Chief Leschi (c. 1808–1858)
Leschi was born around 1808 to a Nisqually chief and a Klickitat mother, into the Mishalpam, or “Mashel River people,” band of the upper Nisqually. He grew up moving between the prairies of south Puget Sound and the Yakama country east of the Cascades, and became a respected leader known for his skill with horses and his standing among both his own people and neighboring tribes.
The Medicine Creek Treaty (1854)
In December 1854, Governor Isaac Stevens called Nisqually, Puyallup, and other south Sound leaders to Medicine Creek to negotiate a treaty. Leschi signed, but under protest: the reservation set aside for his people was roughly two square miles of poor upland prairie with no access to the Nisqually River his people depended on for salmon. Some later accounts questioned whether the mark beside his name was even his own. Whatever the case, the treaty left the Nisqually with land they could not live on, and it became one of the clearest examples of the broken promises that pushed several Puget Sound and Plateau tribes toward war within a year.
The Puget Sound War (1855–1856)
As war broke out east of the Cascades in the Yakama country, fighting spread west of the mountains as well. Leschi became a leading war chief among the Nisqually, Puyallup, and allied bands resisting American militia and volunteer forces around the Sound, in a conflict often called the Puget Sound War or the Indian War of 1855–56. During the fighting, Colonel A. Benton Moses of the territorial militia was killed. Leschi was accused of the killing, though it was never established that he fired the shot himself.
Trial and Execution
Leschi was captured and tried twice for Moses’s death. His defense argued two things: first, that he had not personally killed Moses, and second — more fundamentally — that Moses had died in combat during a recognized war, so no one on either side could be tried for murder over it. The argument failed. Leschi was convicted and sentenced to hang.
The execution became its own strange chapter in the story. Officers at Fort Steilacoom, who considered Leschi a lawful prisoner of war rather than a criminal, refused to let the hanging take place on military land. He was executed instead just outside the fort’s boundary, on February 19, 1858.
His brother Quiemuth, who had also fought in the war, surrendered to territorial authorities that same winter. He was killed the night after his surrender, inside the governor’s office in Olympia, by an unknown assailant who was never identified or charged.
Exoneration, 2004
For nearly a century and a half, Leschi remained, officially, a convicted murderer. Doubts about the verdict persisted the entire time — among them, later historians noted, even some of the men involved in his prosecution and execution privately questioned it. In 2004, the Washington State Senate passed a resolution recognizing the injustice of his trial. That December, a specially convened Historical Court of Inquiry and Justice — seven sitting and former Washington State Supreme Court justices — reviewed the case and unanimously ruled that Leschi should never have been charged with murder, since he acted as a combatant in a war. The ruling carried no legal force; the original conviction could not be erased from the record. But it was a formal, public statement, delivered before an audience that included Leschi’s own descendants, that the state had gotten it wrong.
Today Leschi’s name marks a school, a park, and a Seattle neighborhood. His story stands alongside Kamiakin’s and Qualchan’s as one of the clearest examples of how the treaties of 1854–55 led directly to war, and of how differently that war was judged depending on which side of it a person was standing.