When Chief Leschi resisted the American occupation by attacking Seattle , he was tried and convicted for murder.
His first trial resulted in a hung jury because of the judge’s instruction that killing of combatants during wartime did not constitute murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a second trial in which this instruction was not given and his lawyers, Frank Clark and William Wallace, were not allowed to introduce potentially exonerating evidence.
One supporter, William Fraser Tolmie, petitioned the new governor, LaFayette McMullen, to pardon Leschi, but the governor refused. Another supporter, United States Army officer August Kautz, published two issues of a newspaper defending Leschi. Titled the Truth Teller, the newspaper’s masthead stated: “Devoted to the Dissemination of Truth and the Suppression of Humbug.” Tolmie’s petition and the front page of the Truth Teller are reprinted in Ezra Meeker‘s 1905 history, The Tragedy of Leschi.[3] Meeker was one of two who voted for acquittal on the first hung jury trial.
Leschi’s execution was initially scheduled for January 22, 1858, but his supporters arranged an elaborate plot in which the Pierce County sheriff, George Williams, allowed himself to be arrested by sympathetic members of the United States Army rather than carry out the execution. On February 19, 1858, Leschi was hanged in a small valley, from a hastily constructed gallows near Lake Steilacoom, on land which later became a golf course and is now housing. There is a small monument nearby in a strip mall in Lakewood. The hangman is reported to have later said “I felt then I was hanging an innocent man, and I believe it yet.”