Biography
Chief Leschi was a Nisqually leader who resisted Governor Isaac Stevens's coercive 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek and led Native resistance in the Puget Sound War of 1855–56. Captured in late 1856, he was tried for the wartime killing of a militiaman; after a first trial ended in a hung jury, a second convicted him, and he was hanged on February 19, 1858 — a prosecution widely condemned as an act of war wrongly tried as murder. A historical court symbolically exonerated him in 2004. The treaty he resisted is the same one later invoked by the Nisqually fishing-rights fighters.
Note: Birth year approximate (circa 1808).
The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ January 14, 2000 Steilacoom proposed-finding report identifies Leschi’s physical capture by agent Sidney S. Ford Jr. on November 13, 1856. It states that the first trial on November 16 ended in a hung jury; March 18, 1857 was the date set for a new trial, not independently established here as its actual opening. The report confirms his execution on February 19, 1858. The profile’s released flag is removed because he died in custody. The existing release-date boundary remains paired with the separately identified death-in-custody endpoint under the current database convention; it does not denote liberation. The inherited twelve-month value is not independently established by this report and is retained pending separate provenance reconciliation.
BIA, Steilacoom proposed finding, January 14, 2000, PDF page 69 (printed 35).