The arrests of Billy and five other fishermen in March 1964 became the origin of a famous legal dispute that climbed to the U.S. Supreme Court three times—in 1968, 1973, and 1977. The Puyallup Trilogy, as the court case came to be known, includes legal challenges against the Nisqually and Puyallup Indians.
The state of Washington sued the fishermen hoping for a declaratory judgment that would deem state fishing regulations necessary for conservation. Such a judgment would lead to an injunction and criminal penalties for any Indian fisher who violated the order. At the time, the state argued that the Indians “were and are a conquered people without right or title of anything.”
The six fishermen faced criticism from the tribes. Nisqually leaders chastised them as renegades for violating laws to assert their treaty rights, and the theater played out all over the front page. “We got some of our own people calling our family renegades for standing up for their rights. I never could get that,” says Billy’s son, Willie Frank III.
Meantime, George Boldt, a bright, tough federal district judge, rejected petitions for the “renegades” writs of habeas corpus and sent them to jail for a month. “We’d Rather Fish Than Be on Welfare,” activists declared on picket signs as they protested the fishers’ hearing.
“There was six of us that actually kept going back to jail,” Billy relates. “We kept defying the state of Washington and the state judges. These sportsmen were shooting at us down at the mouth of the river. You could hear them spraying the boat. . . . When we started first going to jail, they put us in with all of the other people that was in jail, you know, bank robbers and everybody. They’d always ask us: ‘What are you guys in for?’ ‘We’re in for fishing.’ ‘Fishing?! What the hell are they doing? We’re here for robbing a bank and killing somebody.’”
The renegades lost ground with their tribes, but gained ground with sympathizers. Their struggle remained front-page news. “First, at the beginning, nobody saw what we were doing,” says Billy. “We were getting raided, and then finally they were beating on all of us, up and down the river. Finally, we got connected with the churches and all of the kind of fathers of Seattle. They come out here to witness what was going on. And that was a big time, a big change.”
Although the struggle of Indian fishermen hit the papers, they remained an undisputed underdog. White society “didn’t think we were smart enough, educated enough, or organized enough” to pull off the uprisings, says Joe Kalama, archivist for the Nisqually Tribe.
The fishing struggle worked its way from the riverbank to the floor of the U.S. Senate. Billy and the tribes could have lost their treaty rights in a buyout. In an attempt to resolve the fishing crisis, Warren Magnuson, Washington’s longtime U.S. senator, proposed the government buy the tribes’ treaty rights or allow the state to regulate off-reservation Indian fishing. “These [Indian] treaties are still on the books today,” Magnuson attested. “They are supreme law of the land and they must be respected and honored. . . . The only concession reserved to the Indians was the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed grounds and if they are to be deprived of any part of this they should be properly compensated. . . . I believe these treaties are part of our heritage—but solely, in support of fish conservation, I believe that these treaties should fit present day conditions in the overall consideration for maintaining our fishery resources.”
Magnuson told the U.S. Senate that his request for an estimate of the Indian fishery from the Department of Interior remained unanswered; such a figure could not be estimated “since this includes commercial as well as subsistence fishing.” The Interior Department did note that the Corps of Engineers paid more than $26 million for the loss of Indian fishery rights when The Dalles Dam was built.
Magnuson’s proposals died in committee, but the Sportsmen’s Council, an organization founded in 1934 to protect wildlife and promote sportsmanlike hunting practices, was girded for battle: “Your rivers are being destroyed. The most dangerous force at this time is the Indian fishery that exists in our rivers with total disregard for all accepted conservation principles. . . . The people of Washington and the other 49 states think of the Indian as the ‘Poor ignorant Redman who has been deprived of all of his rights.’” The council continued in a letter to members: “Since 1924, he has had all of the rights you have, plus many more. . . . Help eliminate ignorance by informing the public of the truth.”
