Chapter Ten

The tribes of the Medicine Creek treaty seemed doomed. Of the three major groups signing the treaty—the Puyallups, the Nisquallies, and the Squaxins—only the Squaxins were to keep their reservation intact. The Nisquallies and the Puyallups had their ancestral lands torn from them by the government. Like the Puyallups, the Nisquallies had long been friends to the white settlers. Their traditional lands were situated on what became known as the Nisqually prairie.

The prairie was a lush and rolling meadow and proved so fertile that the Hudson’s Bay Company chose the site for its agricultural ventures when the fur trade began to ebb. The Puget Sound Agricultural Company was established in 1838 by Dr. John McLoughlin as part of the diversification of the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Fort Nisqually, built in 1833 for the fur trade, proved to be the community center around which the British settlers gathered. After the area was ceded to the United States following the agreement on the Oregon Territory, the claims of the British to the lands of the Nisqually prairie continued and were finally settled in the 1870s, long after the old settlers had passed on.

By the time of the American treaties, the Nisquallies were well acquainted with the agricultural exploits of the settlers. They had themselves begun to raise crops, and many of the Nisquallies had large herds of horses and cattle. Fort Nisqually became Fort Steilacoom in 1849, when the Americans began to rush into the lower Puget Sound region; it was generally regarded as the most important military post in Washington Territory west of the Cascades, because of its long history as a trading post and gathering place.

While the Nisquallies had a long history of friendship with the British, they were not very fond of the Americans. Holding the major part of the rich prairie lands and owning fishing rights along the Nisqually River, which emptied into the southernmost part of Puget Sound, the Nisquallies felt the intrusions of the American settlers much more than did the other tribes of the region. Everyone who came to Washington Territory seemed to pass through the lands of the Nisquallies.

In 1854, when Isaac Stevens called the tribes together to sign the Medicine Creek treaty, the influence of the Nisquallies was such that the Indians gathered at little Medicine Creek, in the heart of the Nisqually lands. Stevens asked each chief to make a map of his country so that he could put the maps together and determine where he would place the reservations. Leschi, then chief of the Nisquallies, immediately suspected Stevens’s motives and refused to finish his map. Had it not been for the tact of George Gibbs, Stevens’s assistant, who was very friendly to the Indians, a war might have broken out then and there between the Nisquallies and the Americans.

When Stevens designated the land that was to be the Nisqually reservation, emotions grew even more tense. He had chosen a rough, rocky plain far away from the Indians’ traditional fishing sites and even some distance from their prairies. The new reservation was unfit for anything, and the Nisquallies immediately protested. Stevens departed for the other treaty meetings without offering any compromise to the Nisquallies, and the rumor quickly spread that Stevens was determined to confine the Indians in a reservation of eternal gloom, aptly called by the Nisquallies Polakly Illahe. Conflict was building even while Stevens was sending optimistic reports back to Washington, DC, about his success in negotiating with the Indians west of the Cascades.

As the Indians became more terrified of Stevens’s real plans, word came from the eastern part of the territory that the Yakimas had begun to fight the Americans. On January 26, 1855, Leschi gathered a force of Nisquallies and Klickitats and, as we have seen, attacked the little settlement of Seattle, ultimately with little success. Due to the treachery of fellow Indians and to the superiority of American naval strength, Leschi’s attempt to repel the settlers failed. Nevertheless, Indian pressure was brought to bear at the conference of August 1856 at Fox Island, where Stevens finally relented and set aside a good reservation for the Nisquallies.

But things had gone too far for Leschi. He was captured in the fall of 1856, shortly after the Fox Island conference, and was placed on trial by the settlers for murder. His old friends from the Hudson’s Bay Company worked hard to save him, because they felt that the Nisquallies had had ample provocation for war in the manner in which Stevens had disregarded their complaints. Even the military officers who had fought against Leschi appealed for his life, contending that he had been captured during a period of war and was therefore a prisoner of war and should not be tried by a civil court for acts committed during military hostilities.

Leschi’s old rival Chief Seattle entered an eloquent plea for Leschi, mustering the most simple logic one could imagine:

Leschi rebelled against bad treaty. White man gives Leschi’s people new treaty. White man must know, in his heart, that first treaty was unfair. Or why give new treaty?

The old Duwamish chief felt that if Stevens had admitted his error at Fox Island and drawn up a new and better reservation for the Nisquallies, then Leschi’s reason for starting the war against the whites was fully justified. But the settlers saw in Leschi a spirit of independence and rebellion that they did not wish to encourage among the Indians, who still outnumbered them.

On February 19, 1858, after several trials and many appeals by both whites and Indians had been turned down, the settlers hanged Leschi for his part in the war of 1855–56. The greatest Indian patriot of the Puget Sound region went to his death secure in the knowledge that in his rebellion and fight against overwhelming odds he had secured a suitable reservation for his people. It was, perhaps, little enough satisfaction, since in later years many of those who had been so determined to convict Leschi for murder admitted that he probably had not even committed any killings.

The original Nisqually reservation had contained a mere 1,280 acres about two miles west of the mouth of the Nisqually River in an area of steep cliffs covered with a dense underbrush. During the Fox Island negotiations, this reservation was changed and the Nisquallies received a new reservation, on the grassy meadow along the Nisqually River east of the old reservation, containing some 4,717 acres. The new area was part of the lands the Nisquallies had traditionally used for their horse herds, and so it was much more acceptable to the people.

Life on the Nisqually reservation was about the same as life in other small communities during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Indians had long since learned about farming and ranching, and they engaged in those activities as a supplement to their fishing. Their horse herds grew and their farms blossomed, and of all the Indian villages west of the Cascades the Nisquallies were perhaps the most successful in adjusting to the new ways of the white man.

As we have seen earlier, the Nisqually school was so advanced that students were hired as assistants to the teachers, receiving as a salary a sum equal to that received by the Indian police, five dollars a month. The problems that occurred with some frequency at other reservations never seemed to plague the peaceful Nisquallies. In 1884, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to survey the Nisqually reservation so that it could be divided into allotments for trial members in accordance with then-existing government policy. The idea behind this division of tribal lands, as we have seen, was to use the magical powers of ownership of private property to further civilize the Indians, and the Nisquallies were among the first to come under the new policy.

An indication of how cohesive the Nisquallies were as a community may be their reaction to the allotment of their lands. After the government agent had marked off the individual allotments and informed each tribe member where his lands were and what the Bureau of Indian Affairs expected of him, the Nisquallies held a community meeting. They had never been faced with individual ownership of lands before, and the idea was very foreign to their customs and to their religion. Land, like water and air, could not be divided, according to their understanding, because the Great Spirit had created it, not man, and He had not wanted it divided among men as if it were a thing. It was a living being, the mother of mankind, and had to be treated as such.

The problem the community faced, therefore, was to avoid antagonizing the Indian agent and at the same time avoid violating their deepest convictions. So they fenced off the entire reservation with rail fences and used the whole 4,717 acres as a common pasture for the community. Inside the rail fence, individual families fenced off their garden plots and homesteads so that the cattle and horses would not destroy their gardens. The agent, of course, was baffled at the Nisquallies’ solution to the problem and wisely decided to let well enough alone. For more than forty years, the Nisquallies maintained a common pasture; their fence marked off their little community and way of life from the rest of the territory with its hustle and bustle.

Unlike their neighbors the Puyallups, the Nisquallies were not close to the expanding centers of population such as Tacoma and Seattle, and there was no reason to suppose that they would ever fall victim to the land speculators who were quite prominently at work in the Puget Sound area. But such was not the case. By mid-1916, war fever was in the air and everyone expected the United States to become involved in the European war. Speculators were well aware that a dollar was to be made in land during the war.

In December of 1916, Jesse O. Thomas Jr. and Stephen Appleby of Tacoma went to the nation’s capital and had a quiet meeting with the secretary of war. They promised to secure seventy thousand acres of land for the army in Pierce County, Washington, in return for the secretary’s promise to build a fort and maintain a division of men in the county. Land prices would boom, of course, and the profits to Tacoma businessmen in supplying the fort would be enormous. All they had to do was build the patriotic fever to a hysterical pitch and then present their plan.

As war approached, patriotism escalated in Tacoma and soon it was an accepted conclusion that the only proper way to win the war in Europe would be to have a division of men stationed near Tacoma. The county authorities began a program of condemnation of lands to be given to the army for the fort, and those landowners who understood what was happening seemed to receive generous appraisals of their lands while those who showed some hesitancy at the program seemed to receive somewhat lower valuations. The program went very smoothly until it reached the boundaries of the Nisqually reservation.

Indian land was, of course, land held by the United States for the Indians, and it could not be taken over by county authorities without the permission of Congress. So a careful program had to be devised to seize the lands under the guise of patriotism with the thought that in the general frenzy of war fever certain legal niceties could be overlooked. The first move against the Nisquallies was a tour of the reservation by General Burr of the army and the Nisquallies’ agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The general strutted about the riverbank solemnly explaining the situation to the Indian agent and remarking that he was concerned primarily for the safety of the Indians should the fort be established.

A panicked agent wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs in December 1917 about his tour with the general:

An investigation of the grounds in company with General Burr showed that the safety of the Indians during the hours of target practice would require the removal of the Indians from both the upland and the river bottom, to avoid ricocheting shells; that is, the entire reservation would have to be abandoned during those hours.

The agent rather innocently informed the general that it would be a good idea to try to lease the lands from the Nisquallies for the duration of the war, because the provisions of the Medicine Creek treaty and the price in lives that the Nisquallies had already paid for their lands was more than the army or Pierce County could afford. The agent might have simply stated that under no conditions would the Indians have parted with their lands but, since the war fever was intense in Tacoma, he dared not say anything that might be interpreted as hostile to the war effort.

The general reported on the tour to his superiors, and a series of letters began to pass back and forth between the Departments of War and the Interior concerning the necessity of giving up the Nisqually lands for Fort Lewis. The Interior Department was in favor of leasing the lands to the War Department, while the army and the businessmen in Tacoma were intent on securing clear title to the thirty-three hundred acres as agreed upon in December 1916. While these formal letters were traveling back and forth in bureaucratic circles, the army acted.

Indians were ordered to leave their homes and not return until they were given permission to do so. Some families left but many stayed, and they were simply loaded on wagons with some of their household goods and transported away from the area. A number of Indian families were given just a few hours’ notice before the army arrived to move them, and some of the people spent the remaining months of the winter in makeshift shacks along the Nisqually River wondering why the Bureau of Indian Affairs could not stop the confiscation of their homes and lands. But with the high state of excitement then prevailing in Tacoma, the Indians were afraid that they would be accused of disloyalty if they complained, and so many of them simply left the reservation without saying anything.

Early in 1918, without the knowledge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the authorities of Pierce County began condemnation proceedings against the Nisqually lands on the north of the river, which were the best part of the reservation. When the Interior Department discovered what was happening, officials lodged a protest, albeit not a very strong one, and the army agreed to purchase the lands from the Indians. The War Department appointed an appraiser and urged the Bureau of Indian Affairs to do the same. The bureau appointed the head of the Cushman School, an educator, as their representative, and very shortly the two appraisals were forwarded to officials in each department in the nation’s capital. The War Department representative valued the lands at $57,920.60, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs representative figured the lands were worth $93,760.

In April 1918, a compromise figure was worked out that totaled $75,840, and a decree was entered by the local court vesting title in the lands to Pierce County. The legality of the transaction was not questioned, because of the hysterical fear that raising such questions might be regarded as treason in view of the war. The army in effect purchased the Nisqually land long after it had removed the Indian owners by allowing a local court to transfer the land titles to Pierce County, which in turn was bound by agreement to cede the army seventy thousand acres in return for the construction of a fort near Tacoma. At best, it was a shadowy transaction, unworthy of the US government, but, under the circumstances, not unlikely.

The Indian agent soothed his conscience by the thought that if the transaction was illegal, Congress would find some way to compensate the Nisquallies after the war. The agent was partly correct, because the controversy over the confiscation of the Nisqually reservation refused to die, and in the 1919 Indian Appropriations Act a section was inserted requiring the secretaries of war and the interior to report to Congress on the advisability of reacquiring the lands of the Nisquallies from Pierce County. Apparently Congress did not believe the official War Department version of how the lands for Fort Lewis were acquired and wanted some joint statement from the two government departments on what had transpired.

So a special investigating commission was sent out to Tacoma to learn what had happened two years before, in the hysteria of war fever. In the spring of 1920, the report was finally filed with the House of Representatives Committee on Indian Affairs. Even the official version did not do credit to the United States. The report was purged of accounts of Indian families dispossessed of their homes in midwinter, but it still contained enough material to shame the two departments for their roles in the confiscation of the Indian lands.

The two department representatives first advised against restoring the lands to the Nisquallies under the theory that they were now comfortable in their new homes. Where they received such information is questionable, since the report does not indicate that they talked with very many of the Indians who had been forced to move. The second outstanding feature of the report is the acknowledgment by the two representatives that the Indians did not receive fair value for their lands regardless of how they were appraised. One white man owned land adjoining the reservation—land not nearly as good as the Nisquallies’. He received more than $32,000 for 1,350 acres that had no river bottom lands or running water to make the land valuable.

Most puzzling was the response of the county attorneys when asked about the transaction. The investigators asked Mr. J. T. S. Lyle, one of the attorneys for Pierce County, for a copy of the army’s deed to the lands. The attorney refused to give a copy of the deed to the investigators, and when they inquired at the county offices they were informed that the deed had never been filed! The county assessor did inform the commission that had he been allowed to value these lands for tax purposes he would have appraised them at $66,650, and the commission noted that county assessors are notoriously generous when appraising lands for tax purposes.

Perhaps the best indication of how badly the Nisquallies were cheated is the condition in which they found themselves when they tried to purchase lands for new homes on the river after they had been paid for their old allotments. Willie Frank, for example, had an allotment of 205 acres on the northern side of the river that was taken for the army post. With the money he received for the lands, he was able to purchase only six and a half acres on the south bank of the river! Other Indians found themselves in similar circumstances, and many simply moved away to live on other reservations where they had relatives.

The investigators finally recommended that Congress appropriate another $85,000 to be paid to the Nisquallies as additional compensation for their lands. The legality of the whole transaction, dubious at best, was never mentioned. The only comment made in the report to Congress regarding the justice of the proceedings noted

that owing to war-time conditions and influences the county attorneys at the time of the condemnation proceedings took the fullest advantage of the situation, with the result that the Indians received considerably less than their lands were worth, and have not been provided with lands of like character and location and of equal advantage and acreage.

Although the investigation clearly showed that the Nisquallies did not lose their fishing rights in the condemnation proceedings, the state began harassing the Nisqually fishermen following the confiscation of their reservation on the theory that they had lost everything when the county received the lands. The Nisquallies and the state fish and game departments began an undeclared war over fishing rights that has lasted until the present time, with the Indians continually complaining that if the state officials really knew the history of their tribe they would see the justice of the Indian cause.

We shall return to the fishing-rights controversy and the Nisquallies later, because their story, far from ending, is continuing today in more heroic terms than ever before. We need only note that the suspicions of Leschi, the great Nisqually chief, about the intentions of the white settlers were unfortunately fulfilled nearly two generations after his valiant effort to achieve justice for his people, and it is tragic to note that the lands he secured with his life were taken from his people under the guise of patriotism in a wholly unnecessary act.