Westing in America

The Trail
The Oregon Trail was a dangerous route at that time. Of some 100,000 people who undertook the journey, about 10,000 died before reaching their destination. They were seldom attacked by Indians, but succumbed instead to cholera and smallpox. Human wastes and bodies buried near the trail polluted many water sources, making disease their major enemy. A few years later, when some of Ezra’s family came to join him in Washington, Ezra’s mother died of cholera on the Trail in Wyoming. Ezra, with his wife of 18 and child of 6 months, crossed the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and joined the Oregon Trail a few miles into Nebraska in April, 1852. With them was Ezra’s close friend, William Buck, and a few other families. Buck was a bachelor and a trailwise man who knew how to handle himself on the prairie. Somehow they all avoided the hazards of the journey, and arrived two months later at Soda Springs, Idaho, where the trail forked. The southern fork led to the gold fields of California, where gold had been discovered three years previously at Sutter’s Mill in 1849. The northern fork went up the Snake River to the Columbia River and on to Oregon and Washington Territories. At Soda Springs, decisions were made that influenced the development of West Coast states for centuries to come.

Gold fever ran high in 1852. Ezra’s little party sat long at their Soda Springs campsite before choosing whether to go north or south. Buck was inclined to take the southern fork in search of riches and adventure. Ezra and Eliza preferred to head north in their quest for farmland. Painfully, they chose to separate. The same choice was made by many others on the Trail, with most single men heading for California while most families went north. Multiplied many times over, that choice had much to do with the developing character of the West Coast. San Francisco became The Golden Gate and a city of permissive adventure, wealth, and good times. Portland and Seattle grew into more modest, family-oriented cities. If San Francisco was an X-rated city, Seattle became a place of Parental Guidance. Initial conditions do have their effects on what follows from them.

On the northbound trail with Ezra were many missionaries anxious to convert the Indians to Christianity. Most of them had heard the story of the Whitman Mission. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Methodist missionaries, had located along the Oregon Trail in Washington in 1836, where they converted many Cayuse Indians and also provided supplies to settlers traveling the Trail. When a measles epidemic struck the area in 1847, many Indians died while white Europeans were unaffected. The Cayuse blamed the missionaries; they killed the Whitmans and eleven others and burned the mission. There were also other incidents in Washington where missionaries had been attacked by Indians for the strange diseases and foreign religion they brought with them. So when northbound missionaries reached the Columbia River after 1847, they tended to turn south into Oregon which was considered safer than risky Washington. That could be why Oregon now has many devout Christians, and Washington fewer.

When Ezra’s party reached the Columbia River at The Dalles, they rafted west to Portland, then turned north into Washington Territory. Ezra built his first small cabin near Kalama on the north shore of the Columbia. The land was densely wooded with old-growth fir and cedar trees. He had only small carpentry tools incapable of falling trees six feet in diameter and 250 feet tall. But he did have an auger to bore holes in them. To fell them, he would bore a horizontal hole as deeply as possible, then an angled hole to meet with it. When hot coals were placed at the junction of the two bores and fanned by the draft they produced, the tree would begin to burn from the inside out, and eventually fall. The problem with this method was that it could not be predicted when the tree would fall, or where. Once Ezra was caught between two falling trees and had to scramble through the branches to reach home, but was otherwise unhurt.

Ezra and Leschi
From Kalama, Ezra went north to explore Puget Sound in search of farmland. He then relocated to McNeil Island near Tacoma. One of the first things Ezra did at Puget Sound was to learn the language for conversing with Native people. Several languages were in use then, but a patois had long since developed so that tribes could communicate with one another. Ezra soon learned enough to meet most needs. One hundred seventy two years after William Meeker arrived in Massachusetts, his descendant had made a home on the Pacific Coast of America.

The newly appointed governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, was determined to establish reservations for the Indians to clear the way for settlers to claim land. In 1854 he pushed hard for a treaty to move Indian tribes to lands he had selected and to give up rights to their ancestral homes. The Medicine Creek Treaty was completed in 1855 and ratified by Congress. It was seriously disputed by the tribes, claiming that their signatures had been forged and that the reservations they had been assigned were unacceptable and inadequate to meet their needs. The disputes soon became violent, people on both sides were killed, and Governor Stevens proclaimed martial law. A state of war existed. In one skirmish, a white lieutenant was killed. Stevens called it murder, and arrested Leschi, a prominent member of the Nisqually Tribe as the guilty party.

Leschi was born into the Nisqually tribe of southern Puget Sound in 1808. The tribe was roughly divided between “horse people” and “fish people” according to their proximity to grassland and water. Leschi was a horse person, and his family had long raised and traded horses, a practice that Leschi learned early. He also worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company with its strong presence of British settlers in the area. He got along well with the “King George Men” as well as the “Boston Men” who arrived later. He helped settlers to find good land, and often sold or loaned them horses for their farming and road-building projects. The Nisquallies had no formal government, but Leschi was recognized as a leader who often led tribal decision-making discussions and arbitrated disputes. He was known for his intelligence, fairness, rhetorical skills, and good-natured character, and was respected by Indians and whites alike. His wife said that she had never seen him angry or violent.

Leschi refused to sign Governor Stevens’s Medicine Creek Treaty. An aide to the governor threatened to sign it for him, and may have done so for Leschi and for several other chiefs who refused. Leschi was seen as the major obstacle to Governor Stevens’s plan to remove the Indians and open their lands to white settlement. Stevens portrayed Leschi to the press as a troublemaker and an enemy to white aspirations. Convicting him of murder looked like a good way to discredit Leschi’s influence with the tribes and to clear the way for Stevens’s plan. Many white settlers agreed with the governor.

When Leschi came to trial, Ezra Meeker, then 25, was randomly selected to the jury. Evidence was sketchy and circumstantial, witnesses were suspected of perjury, and in a time of war, killing an enemy soldier was not murder under the law. Ten jurors found Leschi guilty, but Ezra and one other juror voted for acquittal. The jury was dismissed and a new trial convened, this time manipulated by the governor to assure the verdict he wanted. Leschi was convicted and after many delays was hanged in 1857. Ezra later wrote a book, The Tragedy of Leschi, in which he documented the sordid details of Leschi’s story. Nearly 150 years after the death of Leschi, the Washington State Supreme Court, convened as a Court of Historic Inquiry in 2004, examined the evidence in the case and exonerated Leschi from the charge of murder. The entire story has been examined in detail recently in a book by Richard Kluger, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash between White and Native America (Knopf, 2011). The story is one of the worst of many examples of injustice between American governments and American Natives.