Throughout 2021 the Sunday Olympian’s Looking Back feature portrayed events and people from the Sylvester’s Window cityscape project. Leschi, a member of the Nisqually tribe, was designated a leader of the tribe in treaty negotiations after Washington gained territorial status, but refused to sign the Medicine Creek treaty, deeming it inadequate to preserve the Nisqually way of life. He was later judicially murdered for his role in the so-called Indian Wars of the 1850s, but posthumously exonerated in 2004.
Raphael Coombs painting, 1894, courtesy Washington State Historical Society
Text © Deborah Ross and The Olympian 2021