On the morning of February 19, 1858, about three hundred people gathered around a hastily built wooden gallows near Lake Steilacoom in Pierce County. At the edge of the crowd, a small group of Nisqually watched in silence. In the distance, drums could be heard.
The man on the scaffold was Leschi, a chief of the Nisqually Indian Tribe. He was around fifty years old. He had been convicted of murdering a militia volunteer named Colonel A. Benton Moses during the Puget Sound War three years earlier. His lawyers had argued two things: first, that Leschi had not actually killed Moses, and second, that even if he had, Moses was a combatant in a war, and killing an enemy soldier in battle was not murder. Neither argument had worked.
Leschi walked up the steps without assistance. The hangman, a man named Charles Grainger, was trembling. Leschi was not. "He did not seem to be the least bit excited at all," Grainger later recalled. "Nothing of the kind, and that is more than I could say for myself. In fact Leschi seemed to be the coolest of any on the scaffold."
Grainger carried out the execution. He would carry the memory of it for the rest of his life. "I felt then I was hanging an innocent man," he said, "and I believe it yet."
The story of how Leschi ended up on that gallows begins four years earlier, at a treaty table. In December 1854, Washington Territory's first governor, Isaac Stevens, sat across from Nisqually and Puyallup leaders at Medicine Creek and asked them to sign away most of their ancestral lands. In exchange, the tribes would receive small reservations. The Nisqually reservation Stevens proposed was two square miles of forested land with no access to the Nisqually River. For a people whose entire existence depended on fishing, this was not a compromise. It was a death sentence.
Leschi had been appointed by Stevens himself to represent the Nisqually at the treaty talks. He had been friendly to American settlement. He spoke multiple languages. He cared for a large herd of horses. His mother was Yakama, his father Nisqually. He was, by every account, a man who understood the value of getting along with the newcomers. But what Stevens put on the table at Medicine Creek was something Leschi could not accept.
An X appears next to Leschi's name on the treaty. Whether he actually put it there has been disputed ever since.
What is not disputed is what happened next. Leschi took up arms. He became the leading chief of a fighting force drawn from several Puget Sound tribes. Outgunned and outnumbered, they fought for over a year before retreating to the Kittitas Valley in 1856. Leschi was eventually betrayed, captured, and charged with the murder of Colonel Moses.
His first trial, held in Pierce County, ended in a hung jury. Ezra Meeker, a pioneer and one of the jurors, voted to acquit. A second trial was moved to Thurston County, where the population was less sympathetic to Native Americans. This time, the judge did not instruct the jury that killing an enemy combatant in war was not murder. Leschi was convicted and sentenced to hang.
Even then, people tried to save him. Military officers at Fort Steilacoom refused to carry out the execution, arguing that Leschi was a lawful combatant. The Pierce County sheriff, George Williams, was so reluctant that he allowed himself to be arrested by sympathetic Army soldiers rather than go through with it. Army officer August Kautz published a newspaper called The Truth Teller, with a masthead that read: "Devoted to the Dissemination of Truth and the Suppression of Humbug." Two issues defended Leschi's innocence. William Fraser Tolmie petitioned the new governor for a pardon. The governor refused.
So on February 19, 1858, Leschi climbed the steps, and Grainger did what he had been told to do, and the drums in the distance did not stop.
The irony is that the war achieved something close to what Leschi wanted. After the fighting ended, the Nisqually reservation was expanded to include land along the river. The people got access to the water that sustained them. Leschi did not live to see it.
He was reburied on tribal land on July 4, 1895, in a ceremony attended by about a thousand people. Ezra Meeker, the juror who had voted to acquit nearly four decades earlier, chartered a train to bring white Tacomans to the service. To Meeker, Leschi was a patriot who had been martyred by a governor's ambition.
In 2004, 146 years after the hanging, the Washington State Supreme Court convened a special historical court of inquiry to reexamine the case. A seven-judge panel reviewed the evidence and reached a unanimous conclusion: if Leschi killed Colonel Moses, he did so as a combatant in a recognized war, and the charge of murder was unjust. The ruling had no legal authority to overturn the original conviction, but it did not need to. When the verdict was read aloud at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma, the room erupted.
Cynthia Iyall, a Nisqually elder and descendant of Leschi's sister, had spent years leading the effort to clear his name. "This is really about the future," she said. "This is for all the kids. They need to know who that man was and what truthfully happened to him."
Today, Leschi's name is on a neighborhood in Seattle, a park on Lake Washington, schools in Seattle and Puyallup, and a combat training center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. His story is in the textbooks now, though for a long time it was not. And at the site near Lake Steilacoom where the gallows stood, the land was eventually developed into a golf course and then suburban housing. A four-ton granite monument was installed in a strip mall in Lakewood in 1963. It reads: "Leschi, Chief of the Nisquallies. Martyr to the vengeance of the unforgiving white man."