Antonio B. Rabbeson was born in 1825 in New York City, the son of "rich but honest parents" (History of the Pacific Northwest, 529). His father died in 1833, and Rabbeson, unable to get along with his stepfather, left home at a young age. He reportedly spent time in Canada and the southern states, then trekked the Oregon Trail west, turned north, and in late 1846 ended up at Budd Inlet, the southern terminus of Puget Sound. At age 21 or 22 he became a valuable member of the community, a well-respected jack-of-all-trades. Moving between Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, Rabbeson sometimes seemed to be everywhere. He worked as a carpenter, sawmill operator, brickmaker, mailman, farmer, surveyor, sheriff, soldier, legislator, oysterman, justice of the peace, mechanical draftsman, general contractor, shipwright, saloon keeper, brewer, cigar-store operator, architect and, finally, undertaker. Infamously, he played a central and conflicted part in the prosecution and trials of Nisqually Chief Leschi, which resulted in Leschi's execution. This came to be widely viewed as a legal and moral travesty that would not have occurred but for Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens's thirst for vengeance and Rabbeson's perjured testimony.
The Trailblazers
In 1844 George Bush (ca. 1790-1863) and Michael Simmons (1814-1867) led a party of pioneers from Missouri to Oregon, hoping to claim land on the Rogue River. Bush, a successful farmer in Missouri, was a free African American living in a slave state. He faced increasing discrimination and decided to move west, only to learn that the provisional legislature of what was then known as Oregon Country barred settlement by African Americans. Not wishing to separate from the Bush family, Simmons and the others crossed the Columbia River into what would in 1853 become Washington Territory.
Simmons scouted a site for a settlement at the falls where the Deschutes River entered Budd Inlet at the southern end of Puget Sound in what is now Thurston County. He would name it New Market (later Tumwater). In October 1845, the full party came to Puget Sound, arriving late that month. One year later, in October 1846, Antonio Rabbeson and several other settlers arrived, all claiming land on and around Budd Inlet. Two of Rabbeson's fellow travelers, Edmund Sylvester (1821-1877) and Levi Lathrop Smith (d. 1848), jointly claimed land on the Puget Sound shore and platted a town called Smithfield (the future Olympia).
Restless Youth
Almost nothing is known of Rabbeson's youth. He did not get along with his stepfather and left the family as soon as he was able. An 1889 account compiled by the North Pacific History Company of Portland provides what purports to be a sketch of his early travels after leaving New York:
"We find him out in Canada, soon at New York City with his grandparents and attending school, but within a few months on a coasting ship to Florida, where with two mutinous sailors he left the ship and wandered through Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky to Cincinnati, where his companions left him to shift for himself. Making his way to Columbus, Ohio, he obtained steady work but also found and read the biography of a Rocky Mountain man, which fired his mind with a burning youthful desire to go West and try it for himself. Nevertheless, it was not until after further wanderings in Canada, a short period at Buffalo, a trip on the lakes, and a few years in the old West – Ohio and Illinois – that he finally got his feet on the Oregon Trail for it was mythic Oregon which was his lure" (History of the Pacific Northwest, 529).
There is no way to verify any of the above account, and it seems to encompass too many exploits over too short a span. In 1886 Rabbeson himself described his movements after the reaching the Northwest, not mentioning any earlier adventures:
"[O]n my first arrival in the territory in 1846 the only mode of travel was either to walk or go on foot [sic]. When I arrived at the mouth of the Cowlitz River and wanted to visit Puget Sound, I was compelled to shoulder my blanket and take the trip on foot, and had to live on such food as could be had of the Indians, the food consisting of salmon and fern roots" ("The Pioneer of '46").
On the fourth or fifth day of travel, Rabbeson
"arrived at the last and only American settlement on Puget Sound. I found there the following settlers with their families: Michael T. Simmons, George Bush, Gabriel Jones, John Kindred and James McAllister and the following single men; Jesse Ferguson and Samuel Crockett.
"I passed the night at the house of George Bush, a colored man, one of the most hospitable, generous, and benevolent men that have ever lived. I have always found frontiersmen of that character, but he was an exception, ever ready to share his last mouthful of food with the needy, and to lend all the help that was in his command to those who required it" ("The Pioneer of '46").
A Useful Young Man
Rabbeson was just 21 or 22 years old when he reached Budd Inlet, but he soon proved to have many talents. In July 1847 he built a brick kiln and cut shingles for another settler. It is believed to have been the first kiln north of the Columbia River. In August that year he became a partner with Michael Simmons and six other men in the Puget Sound Milling Company, the first American company and first sawmill on the Sound, with equipment purchased from the Hudson's Bay Company.
The mill was in operation by that winter, with young Rabbeson at the controls. He later claimed, "This was the first effort to manufacture lumber on Puget Sound … and I had the honor of being the first to cut a board on its waters" (History of the Pacific Northwest, 530). He quickly became a valued member of the small community, and in 1848 was elected sheriff of Lewis County (from which Thurston County would later be created).
On Whidbey, but Briefly
Isaac Ebey (1818-1857) is credited as the first non-Native settler on Whidbey Island, but he was not the first to try. In the spring of 1848, Thomas W. Glasgow; his Native American wife, Julia (1830-1857); Antonio Rabbeson; and settler A. D. Carnefix canoed north from Tumwater. First they explored Hood Canal, the first white men to do so. Carnefix dropped out of the expedition, but Glasgow, Rabbeson, and Julia landed at a prairie plot on the west side of Whidbey Island that Glasgow had claimed the previous year and where both men intended to settle. Shortly after their arrival, members of almost every Puget Sound tribe and band arrived at Penn Cove to have what Rabbeson called "a grand hunt and big talk" ("On Puget Sound ..."). He estimated, perhaps with some exaggeration, that they numbered about 8,000.
The hunt went very well, but the talk did not, at least for the would-be settlers. Julia's father, Patkanim (1815-1858), was the wily, influential, and volatile chief of the Snoqualmie and allied tribes. At a meeting after the hunt he called for an attack on the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Nisqually "to kill or drive the King George men (as the English were then called) out of the country" ("On Puget Sound ..."). Warned by Julia that the chief planned to kill them first, Glasgow and Rabbeson fled back down Puget Sound, never to return.
Back in Olympia
Upon returning to Olympia, Rabbeson picked up where he had left off. A weekly mail service by horseback and canoe from the Columbia River to Olympia was first established in 1852 by Rabbeson and Benjamin Franklin Yantis (1802-1879). They bought a stage line in 1854 to carry passengers between Olympia and Cowlitz Landing and built a hotel and stage station about a mile northeast of the town of Durgin. That year Rabbeson also helped organize the Democratic Party and served on its Central Committee.
In 1852 Oregon territorial law still barred settlement by African Americans, and Rabbeson, perhaps recalling the kindness of George Bush, signed a petition vouching for George (1817-1905) and Mary Jane (1841-1888) Washington, a Black couple trying to claim land on the Chehalis River. The Washingtons were able to perfect their title after the 1853 creation of Washington Territory, which had no such restriction. In 1875 they founded the town of Centerville (now Centralia).
On January 15, 1854, Rabbeson married Lucy Ann Barnes (1835-1916), at Tumwater. She was also from New York. The marriage would produce five children, three boys and two girls, but the youngest girl, Lulu, died of pneumonia on December 22, 1870, just 2 years of age.
Rabbeson was active in civic affairs and had earned the trust of his few fellow pioneers. In 1854 he was elected sheriff of Thurston County, which had been created out of Lewis County in 1852. In December that year he was delegated to award the contract for the construction of a "suitable and convenient court house" for Thurston County "according to plans that he may deem best" (Rathbun, 24).
The Trials of Leschi
In 1855 several Native American tribes and bands rose up in violent protest against the terms of treaties imposed on them by territorial governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862). Among them were members of the Nisqually tribe from Thurston County, whose chief, Leschi (1808-1858), was considered one of the most influential tribal leaders. Hostilities began in September 1855, and on October 28 nine white settlers were killed in King County in what became known as the White River Massacre. Although neither Leschi nor any Nisqually were involved, the chief, who had refused to sign the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek, became the primary focus for Stevens's vengeance.
Three days after the massacre, on October 31, 1855, a small group of volunteer militiamen was passing through a swampy area near Connell's Prairie in Pierce County when they were ambushed. Among them was Rabbeson, who had joined Company B of the Puget Sound Mounted Volunteers two weeks earlier. Abram Benton Moses and militiaman Joseph Miles were shot dead in the attack. Moses had been Rabbeson's predecessor as Thurston County sheriff and at the time of his death was the Surveyor of Customs for Nisqually.
In March 1856, done with war, Leschi and about 70 remaining followers made their way across the Cascades to take refuge with the Yakama Tribe in the Kittitas Valley. In early fall he returned, having been promised protection by the U.S. military, but on the advice of the army commander of Fort Steilacoom, Colonel Silas Casey (1807-1882), who knew of Stevens's hatred for Leschi, he stayed hidden.
Rabbeson's conflicted role in the Leschi saga began with its first legal proceeding. On November 3, 1856, a grand jury convened in the Third Judicial District at Steilacoom in Pierce County, Judge Francis Chenoweth (1819-1899) presiding, to consider bringing charges again Leschi. The foreman of the grand jury was none other than Rabbeson, still the sheriff of Thurston County and present at the death one year earlier of Abram Moses. He was also the only witness to testify before the grand jury, and he identified Leschi as the killer.
Ten days after the grand jury indictment, on November 13, Leschi's nephew Sluggia betrayed him, delivering him into custody in return for a reward of 50 blankets. Governor Stevens asked Judge Chenowith to open his court in special session to bring Leschi immediately to trial, and the judge complied.
The first trial of Leschi got underway on November 17, 1856, at Steilacoom, just four days after his capture. Due in part to long association, many there did not share the virulent anti-Indian sentiment that prevailed in Governor Stevens's Olympia stronghold in Thurston County. The court records for Pierce County were destroyed in an 1859 fire, but fortunately one of the 12 jurors selected for Leschi's trial was Ezra Meeker (1830-1928), another Washington pioneer. Although he had only six months of formal schooling, Meeker was an avid reader and prolific author. In his 1905 memoir, Pioneer Reminisces of Puget Sound, The Tragedy of Leschi, Meeker pulled no punches:
"The case had been tried outside the court and the prisoner found guilty … There could be no fair trial in such an atmosphere of prejudice and false accusation told and retold a thousand times.
"A painful duty devolves on me here to record the now unquestioned fact of the perjury of the chief, and, in fact, the only witness, A. B. Rabbeson. He was a too willing witness to be truthful, and had not been on the witness stand five minutes until the guilt of perjury showed so plainly reflected in his eyes that no one really believed he was telling the truth" (Meeker, 418).
Meeker continued: "The judge had charged that if the deed were done as an act of war, the prisoner could not be held answerable to the civil law. Four of us so held, and refused to convict" (Meeker, 420). During deliberations, there were repeated votes of 8-4 for conviction. When told the jury was deadlocked, the judge ordered further deliberations. Eventually two dissenters switched, making it 10-2 for conviction. But Meeker and fellow juror William Kincaid remained steadfast for acquittal, and the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. In the early-morning hours of the next day, Leschi's half-brother, Quiemuth, who had surrendered to Governor Stevens in Olympia, was murdered while being confined in Stevens's home. The assailant was never positively identified and no one was convicted of the crime.
Leschi's Second Trial
In December 1856 the territorial legislature moved Pierce County into the Second Judicial District, putting the second trial in Thurston County's Olympia. This ensured that Leschi would be retried in the lion's den, where Stevens ruled supreme, the racist paper Pioneer and Democrat steered public opinion, and a jury would likely include men predisposed to finding him guilty.
The trial began on March 18, 1857. Once again, Rabbeson was the prosecution's star witness, the only one to implicate Leschi, and once again his testimony was convoluted and, to many observers, unpersuasive. Significantly, Judge Edward M. Lander (1816-1907) refused to give an instruction that the killing of an armed enemy in wartime was not recognized as murder. The jury quickly convicted Leschi, and after failed appeals, the chief was "strangled according to the law on February 19, 1858" ("Leschi's Bones Reburied").
Colonel (later General) Granville O. Haller (1819-1897), a veteran of many battles against Native American warriors, later wrote:
"Leschi dropped hostilities, laid aside his rifle and repaired to Puget Sound, his home. He was entitled to protection from the officers and soldiers. But on the testimony of a perjured man, whose testimony was demonstrated by a survey of the route claimed by the deponent to be a falsehood, he was found guilty by the jury – not of the offense alleged against him, for it was physically an impossibility for Leschi to be at the two points indicated in the time alleged; hence he was a martyr to the vengeance of the unforgiving white men" (quoted in Meeker, 209).
Leschi was dead, Quiemuth was dead, and in September 1862 Stevens, at the Civil War's Battle of Chantilly, took a bullet to the brain and was killed instantly. Of the principal antagonists of the Leschi saga only Rabbeson survived, his reputation among most apparently untarnished, his future bright with promise. In the years following Leschi's execution, he moved between Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, engaging in a wide variety of entrepreneurial activities. In his history of Puget Sound, Murray Morgan characterized Rabbeson as "ubiquitous" (Morgan, 106).
More Firsts
After the Leschi trials, Rabbeson's company of soldiers signed a petition to have him appointed to replace Moses as Surveyor of Customs for Nisqually, a position he was given and held for four years. In the territorial census of 1857, Rabbeson was listed as a resident of both Pierce and Lewis counties, working as a surveyor. But that was not his only source of income. He also owned and operated the Fairy, the first American steamer on Puget Sound. On October 22, 1857, the ship's boiler exploded as it was leaving the wharf at Steilacoom bound for Olympia. A woman passengers suffered serious scalding injuries.
In 1859 a Steilacoom newspaper advertisement announced the opening of Rabbeson and Barnes, a purveyor of stoves and metal goods all kinds. In 1862 Rabbeson was elected a justice of the peace for the Steilacoom precinct, and also to the territorial House of Representatives.
By 1863 Rabbeson had relocated to Seattle, pursuing a variety of business opportunities, including operating the Fashion Saloon "next door to Yesler and Denny's store" ("Fashion Saloon"), as advertised in the first issue of Seattle's first newspaper, The Seattle Gazette. Soon tiring of the low quality and high price of imported beer, he scored another first, opening the Washington Brewery in April 1864. A history of brewing in Seattle notes that "he sold both the brewery and the tavern the following year, but his brewery was Seattle's first and the start of the city's brewing tradition" (Stream, 9).
Rabbeson still had maritime ambitions, and while in Seattle he and a man identified only as Hill built a 28-ton flat-bottomed boat, designed as a schooner, but later fitted with machinery to become the sternwheeler Black Diamond, the first steamer built at Seattle.
Back to Where He Started
There are gaps in Rabbeson's history during his later years. It is unclear where he was living in November 1867 when it was announced that "Mr. A. B. Rabbeson has opened an Oyster Saloon in connection with his fruit and confection store, one door south of the Tacoma house" ("A New Institution"). That would seem to have put him in Pierce County, but just two months later, in February 1868, Thurston County Commission members appointed Rabbeson constable for the Olympia precinct, which very likely required his presence there.
It is not certain when Rabbeson left Seattle. He ran for justice of the peace in the 1866 King County elections but lost. He may have moved back to Olympia after that, but in 1872 he served as the architect of Schwabacher Brothers and Company, Building #2, in Pioneer Square, Seattle's first brick building. As there was no governmental licensing of architects or carpenters at the time, anyone could claim to be either in Washington Territory. Experienced carpenters often called themselves architects if they could draft plans and provide them to clients.
Rabbeson's entrepreneurial days were not done. In 1878 he and one R. P. Shoecraft incorporated the Olympia Oyster Company, "planters and dealers in oysters and clams" ("Olympia Oyster Company"), with offices in Olympia.
After long estrangement from his birth family, in late 1883 Rabbeson was visited by a sister whom he had not seen in more than 40 years. She had recently settled in Fargo and somehow heard the Rabbeson name in connection with Tacoma. In the words of The Tacoma Ledger, though they had "parted as children at home, the mysterious workings of concurrent circumstances brought brother and sister together here" (The Tacoma Ledger, January 1, 1884).
In 1885 Rabbeson and a partner named Harned advertised a business in Olympia that sold white-bronze grave monuments. Taking the next logical step, in 1888 Rabbeson struck off on his own to take up what would be the last trade of his long and varied career – A. B. Rabbeson, Undertaker. It was also about this time that his health began to fail. In 1889 he spent several months in California trying to recover from an undisclosed illness. Although his health was reported to have improved, the Washington Standard reported on February 20, 1891, that Rabbeson had died "after a long and painful illness" (Washington Standard, February 20, 1891, p. 3).
Legacy
Antonio B. Rabbeson was a talented, energetic, civic-minded man who accomplished much in the 45 years he spent on Puget Sound. By all accounts he was honest in business, a faithful husband and father, and a brave soldier when called upon to serve. But the unavoidable truth is that he was also a perjurer, and that his perjury was the direct cause of the death of Chief Leschi of the Nisqually, a man who was well respected by nearly all who knew him, Native and non-Native. It can never be known whether Rabbeson believed the testimony that he gave, but it was conclusively proven to be false, too late to be of any help to Leschi.
History has provided vindication for Chief Leschi. On December 10, 2004, a special state historical court cleared Chief Leschi of murder charges. The court did not reach the question of whether Leschi had shot Abram Moses, but ruled, as Judge Chenowith had instructed in the first trial, that Leschi, as a legal combatant, "should not, as a matter of law, have been tried for the crime of murder" ("Historical Court Clears ...").
Leschi's name now graces a school, a park, and a Seattle neighborhood, while Rabbeson, despite his status as a pioneer and his many accomplishments, is little more than a footnote to the region's early history. Even the name of his first land claim, Rabbeson's Prairie, no longer appears on maps.
