Excerpt from Messages from Franks Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way by Charles Wilkinson. In the book, Nisqually leader Billy Frank, Jr. and his father(who lived to be over 100 years old), through a recorded interview, relate the oral history of his people concerning the Mashel Massacre.

ives were lost on both sides during the many skirmishes. The greatest tragedy took place upriver, where Ohop Creek and the Mashel River join with the Nisqually River. Several families l;people who were not warriors, people who wanted to stay away from the conflictl;had retreated to the area, which was near Leschi’s native village. Except for the few open prairies, it is steep, choppy country, the rugged foothills building up to Mount Rainer, thick with blackberry bushes and vine maple, good country to hide out in, but difficult to escape in if caught by surprise. In April 1856, Captain Hamilton J. C. Maxon and his troops came upon a small Nisqually encampment near Ohop Creek and killed everyone in it.Then Maxon and his men discovered a larger group of several families in a fishing camp near the confluence of the Mashel and the Nisqually rivers. Most of the people were women and children; a witness, Robert Thompson, counted only two men. Maxon ordered his soldiers to charge the defenseless Nisqually families.

They slaughtered some seventeen Nisqually and wounded many more. Billy’s dad heard many accounts of Maxon’s Massacre and recounted them during a taped interview. "Those Indians at the massacre, they were . . . up on the hill looking down at the place where the Mashel runs into the Nisqually. They said the soldiers came on them and the Indians all ran down the hill and swam across the [Nisqually] and ran up the other side. And the soldiers were shooting them from the top of the hill. There was a woman carrying a baby on her back and they shot her. She and the baby fell into the river and floated down. . . . Some of the young got away—climbed up the hill on the other side of the river. I don’t know how many they killed, but there were a lot of them."

EDITOR'S NOTE: The site of the Mashel (or Maxon) Massacre is now known as the Nisqually-Mashel State Park, located 1.5 miles west of Eatonville. It is also a salmon and steelhead spawning ground.