where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

spirit of the father 17
“I saw by the dim firelight a man fall and heard a deep groan,”
stated Longmire.“I ran to the falling man and found it was Quiemuth,
speechless and dying. At this moment the governor rushed in, saying
as he saw the dead chief: ‘Who in –– has done this?’ I replied I did not
know.” Quiemuth’s body was sprawled across the carpeted floor of
the governor’s office with a gunshot wound. A fine blade pierced his
chest. The alleged killer, Joseph Bunting, was arrested, but let go due
to “insufficient evidence.”
More than a year later, Chief Leschi appeared emaciated and ill.
Two members of the territorial militia, Joseph Miles and A. Benton
Moses, had died during the Indian wars, in a swamp in 1855. Prosecutors
charged Leschi with the murder of Moses. Leschi “with malice
aforethought . . . did discharge and shoot off his gun” at Moses,
attorneys said. After two trials, Washington Territory prepared to
execute Leschi. As he took his last breath at the gallows before three
hundred people, the Nisqually Indian proclaimed his innocence: “I
went to war because I believed that the Indians had been wronged by
the white men . . . I deny that I had any part in killing Miles and
Moses . . . I did not see Miles or Moses before or after they were dead,
but was told by the Indians that they had been killed. As God sees me,
this is the truth.”
“I felt then that I was hanging an innocent man and I believe it
yet,” wrote executioner Charles Grainger. The former British sailor
treated Leschi fairly and won his respect. At the hanging, Leschi spoke
highly of Grainger, and no one else.
Outraged by the conviction and execution of Leschi, the Nisqually
inscribed on the monument at his gravesite, “Leschi, Chief of the
Nisquallies, Martyr to Vengeance of the Unforgiving White Man was
Hanged 300 yards S.E. from Here Feb. 19, 1858.”
The Indian Wars had ended, but conflict remained. The lucrative
fishing industry attracted non-Indians to Washington rivers. Eventually,
fish wheels, traps, and canneries dotted the landscape. The
first cannery on Puget Sound opened in 1877. The industry was a