SPOKANE, Wash. – A small plot of land in Airway Heights marks a bloody battle 166 years ago in which the military mounted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Indigenous peoples of the Spokane region.
The Battle of Spokane Plains monument is an unassuming pyramid-shaped structure, but it marks the brutal history of September 1858, in which Colonel George Wright and US military forces murdered, burned and hanged members of the Spokane, Yakima and Coeur d’Alene tribes.
“Far too many people do not know in the City of Spokane that there were battles here, between tribal people and soldiers, soldiers coming to kill, tribal people taking up arms to defend women, children, land and their way of life,” Spokane tribe member Warren Seyler said.
Wright organized an attempt to politically and economically devastate the peoples who populated the Inland northwest in the mid-1800s, which resulted in a string of quasi-extrajudicial hangings of tribe members to intimidate indigenous leaders into submission.
“They came here just to destroy. If they couldn’t find us, to kill us, they were going to starve us,” Seyler said.
Don Cutler, the author of “‘Hang Them All:’ George Wright and the Plateau Indian War,” described the intended impact of Wright’s campaigns.
“I don’t think he was the kind of guy that wanted to come in and kill all the Indians. He wanted to come in and just make them obey…behave in the context of a white society,” Cutler said.
A shrewd negotiator, Wright was responsible for overseeing negotiations with Spokanes, Coeur d’Alenes and Yakimas with the goal of curtailing as much indigenous sovereignty as possible.
“The treaties involved taking their land and, in many cases, giving them land that was either poor or was not their ancestral homeland,” Cutler said.
The American military was willing to use terrorizing violence to get what it wanted from the tribes. When Yakima Chief Owhi’s son Qualchan agreed to speak with Wright on Sept. 24, he was promptly arrested and hanged from a tree.
He was one of several indigenous leaders who was told that he was walking into peaceful negotiations with Wright who ended up dead.
“They called them hangings, they were really stranglings. They didn’t use a drop like you think of in a gallows. They would just stand somebody on [a] cart and wrap the rope around their neck and throw it over a tree and hang them from that,” Cutler said.
The legacy of Wright’s brutality continues to echo throughout eastern Washington today, including in the naming of local geography. While Spokane County refers to the waterway as Latah Creek, that stretch of land is still officially labeled Hangman Creek in federal records.
Some Spokane indigenous leaders given that it provides an opportunity to grapple with the real history of violence that formed contemporary Spokane.
Today, the small stretch of land marking the Battle of Spokane Plains serves as a reminder of that violence.
“This ground to tribal people is hallowed ground, no different than any other battles within this world…Don’t be afraid to understand the true history, wherever you are, It happened. It occurred. Whitewashing it or hiding it does no good,” Seyler said.
While the little pyramid marks a small part of the battlefield where members of the Spokane, Yakima and Coeur d’Alene tribes were killed, the majority of that ground is now Fairchild Air Force Base.
