Leschi: The Trial That Wouldn't End
Near Olympia, Washington
On December twenty-sixth, eighteen fifty-four, a group of Nisqually, Squaxin, and other tribal leaders gathered at a place on Medicine Creek, a few miles south of what is now Olympia, and signed a treaty with Isaac Stevens, the territorial governor. The Nisqually leader Leschi was there. Whether he signed willingly is a question that occupied Washington courts for a century and a half.
What the treaty offered the Nisqually was a reservation atop a wooded bluff, away from the Nisqually River. The Nisqually had organized their lives around that river. Their salmon runs were on that river. Their trade routes ran to it and through it. The reservation the treaty put them on had no river access. Leschi protested. The record is clear on that point.
In eighteen fifty-five, fighting broke out across the Washington Territory. Leschi led Nisqually forces. A territorial militia volunteer named A. Benton Moses was killed. Leschi was eventually captured, tried for murder, convicted on a second trial after the first ended in a hung jury, and hanged on February nineteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, outside Steilacoom. The hangman, a man named Charles Grainger, said publicly that he believed he was hanging an innocent man. Leschi maintained his innocence to the end.
The argument from Leschi's defenders then and since was precise: a man cannot be convicted of murder for killing a soldier in a war. Moses was a combatant. The killing occurred in the context of a recognized armed conflict. Murder requires unlawful killing. Wartime killing of an enemy combatant is not murder.
In December of two thousand four, one hundred forty-six years after the hanging, a Historical Court of Inquiry composed of seven present and former justices of the Washington State Supreme Court voted unanimously to exonerate Leschi. Chief Justice Gerry Alexander read the ruling. The decision carried no legal weight under current law. The Nisqually Tribe considered it overdue.
