The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America [Paperback]

Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Kluger brings to life a bloody clash between Native Americans and white settlers in the 1850s Pacific Northwest. After he was appointed the first governor of the state of Washington, Isaac Ingalls Stevens had one goal: to persuade the Indians of the Puget Sound region to leave their ancestral lands for inhospitable reservations. But Stevens's program--marked by threat and misrepresentation--outraged the Nisqually tribe and its chief, Leschi, sparking the native resistance movement. Tragically, Leschi's resistance unwittingly turned his tribe and himself into victims of the governor's relentless wrath. The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek is a riveting chronicle of how violence and rebellion grew out of frontier oppression and injustice.“More than just another tragic story of the American Indian, more than a story of victory and defeat, of good and evil. . . . A powerful human story, as necessary today as ever.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An eloquent account of a massacre’s legacies as well as its history.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“By focusing on one tribe’s historic struggle, Kluger shines a light on our nation’s deplorable treatment of its native people.”
—The Seattle Times
 
“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.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A close and fascinating look at one treaty. . . . With precision and vigorlS6