The Yakama War and the Puget Sound War: Kamiakin, Leschi, and the Fight for the Northwest

Kamiakin had sat in councils all his life, and he knew how they went: days of talk, gifts and argument before anything was settled. What waited on the flat by the Walla Walla River in May 1855 was something else. Governor Isaac Stevens, thirty-seven years old and in a hurry, had brought beef, flour, blankets, tobacco and a treaty already written. By the end of the first week more than a thousand Nez Perce, Cayuse, Walla Walla, Umatilla and Yakama people were camped within sight of his tent. To the Yakama leader it looked like an army with a paper.

Stevens had already made his treaties on Puget Sound, and with word of gold in the Colville country he wanted the plateau's title cleared before the miners came through. He got his signatures. Within months both regions were at war, and both fronts are here: the Yakama stand at Union Gap, Leschi of the Nisqually taking to the trail, the killing of settler families on the White River, militia and marines slogging through the western mud, and Colonel George Wright's columns in the interior.

It ends with the hanging of Leschi in 1858, after two trials, and with what the treaties left behind: the reservations, and the sovereignty the nations of the Sound have kept asserting ever since.

Stevens came to the Walla Walla with the treaty already written. It took three years of war to learn what it would cost.