The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America
By Richard Kluger; Knopf
American Indians are riding tall in the saddle on the publishing trail, with best-sellers like The Killing of Crazy Horse, by Thomas Powers, and Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne, about Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanche people. A Terrible Glory, by James Donovan, and The Last Stand, by Nathaniel Philbrick, both revisit that perennial hit, Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn. This latest entry, by contrast, recounts how a not-so-famous Indian leader got involved in an almost forgotten clash with white Americans: the 1853-58 Indian-settler confrontation in Washington Territory’s Puget Sound region.
It started in the usual ways. Territorial Governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens attempted to persuade the Nisqually and other tribes to trade their traditional land for reservations that the Indians rightfully found unsuitable for hunting, fishing or farming. After meeting at Medicine Creek on Christmas Day 1854, leaders signed the treaty 24 hours later. But that didn’t end the controversy.
Some argue that the leader of Indian resistance, Nisqually Chief Leschi, signed the treaty under protest. Others say he signed without knowing the contents, or that the “X” marked by his name was forged. Therein lies the challenge facing any writer tackling this subject. Records are scarce or nonexistent, especially regarding the treaty negotiations. The author is forced to speculate. So Kluger does, with determined finesse, and raises many questions, some of which no one can answer.
Here is what is known and generally agreed upon. Leschi became Stevens’ nemesis. Violence broke out, terrifying white settlers and prompting Stevens to declare martial law in 1856. It didn’t end until Leschi, betrayed by his own people, was captured in the fall of 1856 and tried for the murder of a white militia leader.
Kluger has the right stuff for this convoluted story: He’s a two-time National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner for Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. His knack for blending legal and social history makes his coverage of Leschi’s two trials—the first ended in a hung jury, the second led to Leschi’s execution—exceptional.
Sympathetic to Leschi, Kluger paints Stevens as a glory-hunting villain. “I do not know anything about your laws,” Leschi said before he was hanged on February 19, 1858. “I have supposed that the killing of armed men in war time was not murder. If it was, then soldiers who killed Indians were guilty of murder, too.” He quotes Leschi’s jailer Charles Grainger: “I felt I was hanging an innocent man—and believe it yet.” Yet he also successfully strives for balance, presenting alternative viewpoints and theories. And he follows the story’s twists after Leschi’s climactic trial and execution. The Nisqually tribe fell into poverty and methamphetamine abuse, then succeeded at casino gaming. In 2004, a “historical” court, headed by two state Supreme Court justices, exonerated Leschi. The ruling meant nothing legally, but as tribal historian Cecilia Carpenter put it, “This was really a way for white people, for the state of Washington, to say, ‘We’re sorry.’”
Originally published in the December 2011 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
