“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 businessman’s dream—every dollar invested in a Puget Sound fish trap returned $2.50. By the 1870s, however, the great fish runs of the Northwest started to diminish. Statehood brought fishing regulations and a commercial licensing system to apply uniformly to all off-reservation fishermen. By the 1890s, the state banned weirs, required a license for off-reservation fishing, and closed rivers to salmon fishing at usual and accustomed fishing grounds of the Indians. “A salmon bound for its native stream was much more likely to end up packed in a can before it could reach the nets of the Indians or its birthplace,” writes Faye Cohen in Treaties on Trial. Salmonrich waters of the Northwest were losing their fish.
The assumption in 1854, that the salmon-rich Northwest could never become salmon-poor, proved dangerously incorrect in time. Demand for salmon and friction between Indians and non-Indians sent treaty fishing rights to the U.S. Supreme Court seven times in seventy years. The origin of those court battles was language in the Treaty of Medicine Creek brokered on the delta in 1854.
Among the many mysteries of Indian Country is the exact birth date of Gramps. Not that it matters much. The Nisqually Indian provided far more answers than questions. His body of knowledge predated statehood. Over the course of his 104 years, the Wright brothers invented the airplane, Americans explored their first personal computers, and the once strong runs of Pacific salmon landed on the Endangered Species List. Gramps had seen it all, and he could tell you how it used to be.
Sometime in 1879, Gramps was born Qu-lash-qud in the village of Yell-Whahlse. The former home of Chief Leschi sat on the south side of Muck Creek prairie, roughly eight miles from the mouth of the tributary. Throughout history, Indians had speared and trapped their fish along the creek. Well into his later years, Gramps remembered the mix of forest, wetland, and prairie grass that dominated his childhood. He remembered Muck Creek in the old days. “This, ah salmon, he comes up the river once every four years and they come up just by the thousands, white man call them humpback salmon; well, the Indian call them hadu, and they just fill the river to spawn. Then they seem to die, after they spawn they die, yeh. The only salmon that went back out was the steelhead; he never die, he went back out to the ocean, I guess, wherever he came from.”
Qu-lash-qud was raised by his father; his mother, Sarah Martin, died when he was young. Qu-lash-qud and his remaining family shared a longhouse with four other families. It had a dirt floor and an open fire. Ferns in his sleeping bunk kept him warm. The young lad lived off the river and the land, getting his fill of fish, huckleberries, and other fruit.
