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Book Review: Chief Leschi and 'Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek'
Monday, March 7, 2011
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment | Law

"When Isaac Stevens, territorial governor of Washington, implemented plans to move the Nisquallies from their ancestral lands to reservations in 1853, Chief Leschi turned from "good Indian" to incendiary. Implacably opposed to removal to a place "where the sting of an insect killed like the stroke of a spear, and the streams were foul and muddy," he organized armed resistance to the whites in Washington. Gov. Stevens' resolve to punish him became an obsession.

In "The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America," Richard Kluger (Pulitzer-winning author of "Simple Justice," a history of Brown vs. Board of Education, and "Ashes to Ashes," an analysis of America's cigarette wars) recounts the confrontation between the two men. Meticulously researched, elegantly written and sophisticated, the book uses this all but forgotten episode in American history to give a human face to the injustices visited on Indians in treaty-making, on the battlefield and, surprisingly, in the courtroom.

Determined not only to defeat but to destroy Leschi, Stevens, who may have ordered someone to forge the chief's signature on the treaty of Medicine Creek, conspired to kidnap and then prosecute him for the murder of a soldier. Leschi's two trials, Kluger demonstrates, constituted "a mockery of legal codes and practices, even for that rough-hewn frontier setting." Antonio Rabbeson, the principal witness against Leschi, also served as the foreman of the grand jury impaneled to indict him."

Get the Story:
A BITTER FIGHT (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 3/5)

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