The Murder in Governor Stevens’s Outer Office
A former Hudson’s Bay man recalls the Puget Sound War: decapitated heads carried to Olympia, Chief Leschi hanged near Fort Steilacoom, and his brother Quiemal killed while waiting to surrender.
Hon. Edward Huggins, of Tacoma, in his very interesting article in last Sunday’s Ledger on the attack of Fort Nisqually by the Snoqualmie and Skeywhamish Indians, says they lived on the Snoqualmie river, a south branch of the Snohomish river, and in 1849 numbered between 300 and 400. The Skeywhamish Indians in 1849 numbered about 450 and lived on the Skeywhamish river, a north branch of the Snohomish river.
The writer of this, in 1850, ’51, ’52, very frequently had trading transactions with these Indians, and they often came to Fort Nisqually to trade in bands of from twenty-five to fifty, and he always found them the most difficult to deal with, being quarrelsome and treacherous. One time in particular three notorious braves forced a quarrel on him in the Indian trade shop, and in the struggle which ensued he barely escaped with his life. During the Indian war of ’55 and ’56, Patkynum offered his services to Governor Isaac I. Stevens, which were accepted, and the chief, with a party of his tribe, were employed in hunting for hostile Indians, and succeeded in capturing a few, who were killed, decapitated, and their heads carried in triumph to Olympia.
The writer was well acquainted with “Patkynum.” He was a sharp, shrewd Indian, but in aspect not at all like the Indian warrior we read about in works of fiction, being small in stature and rather insignificant in appearance. He was well acquainted also with the Nisqually chief Lash-chy-ack, or Leschi, and his brother, Quiemal. They were both good-looking men and skillful hunters, Lash-chy-ack in particular. He surrendered to Colonel Casey, then in command of the United States troops at Fort Steilacoom, under a promise of pardon, but was indicted by the civil authorities for murder, tried, found guilty and hanged in 1856 in a hollow of the prairie near the fort. Quiemal was induced to give himself up to Governor Stevens, and whilst waiting in the governor’s outer office at Olympia, was murdered by some party or parties unknown.
“Whilst waiting in the governor’s outer office at Olympia, [Quiemal] was murdered by some party or parties unknown.”
The 1855–56 Puget Sound War and the executions of Leschi and Quiemal remain central to how Washington remembers its founding. The article’s matter-of-fact account of severed heads carried into Olympia shows how the capital’s early public life was built on Indigenous dispossession—and why that violence still asks for reckoning.
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