A Thousand Gather to Move Leschi's Bones Home
On the Nisqually reservation, chiefs and their families rebury the war leaders Leschi and Quiemuth — and Leschi's nephew tells the crowd who really started the war.
TACOMA, July 3. — The largest gathering of Indians that has assembled in the Northwest for many years met today on the Nisqually reservation, twenty-five miles south of Tacoma. Over a thousand were there. They met to disinter the bones of Leschi and Quiemuth, their two famous war chiefs of 1856-57, and rebury them within the present reservation lines. The ceremonies attendant upon the removal were very impressive, and were witnessed by several score of whites.
Chief Leschi was hanged after being promised protection, and Quiemuth was assassinated at the close of the Indian war in 1856.
George Leschi, a nephew of Leschi and son of Quiemuth, made a speech in the Indian tongue during the ceremonies. He said the war was caused by the whites demanding that the Nisqually and Puyallup Indians be removed to the Quinault reservation on the Pacific coast, and their reservations thrown open to settlement. It was in battling for the rights of their people and to preserve the lands of their forefathers, he said, that the war was inaugurated by the Indian chiefs.
“It was in battling for the rights of their people and to preserve the lands of their forefathers that the war was inaugurated by the Indian chiefs.”
Leschi was hanged in 1858 for a war the U.S. Army itself later conceded was fought over treaty lands; a military board exonerated him in 2004. This 1895 reburial — a thousand people gathering to bring the chiefs' remains back inside the reservation — was an early act of the land-and-memory struggle that continues around Nisqually today.
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