The crackdown pushed on and drove Indian fishing underground. What was once the open pride of the tribes was practiced in secret and in silence.
“I fished at night,” Billy remembers. “I pulled my nets out at dark. I hid my canoes. ”
“We’d go to this island just right above the Landing, probably a mile or so, and he’d drop me off there,” recalls Sugar Frank. “They had a little coffee can full of gasoline and he’d light that on. I’d stand around that coffee can with all the other fishermen at nighttime. They’d make two or three drifts and fill up his canoe. He’d come pick me up and we’d head back down about eleven at night with a boatload of fish.”
Peering through binoculars, officers prowled riverbanks for canoes, gillnets, and Indian fishermen. Often, they confiscated nets.
Sometimes, the Indian fishermen fought back. Billy was the self proclaimed getting-arrested guy. “We were fighting for our life—our survival,” he says. “We fished. We sold our fish. We ate fish. That was what we did. You go down there and there ain’t no fish. There ain’t no boats. There ain’t nothing. So, that really pisses you off, you know? So you do whatever you got to do.”
“Are we under arrest?” asked Al Bridges, Billy’s fishing companion and brother-in-law during one encounter.
“This net is illegal gear and we are taking it at this time,” a Fisheries officer yelled. “I’m telling you right now . . . you are under arrest.”
place for tribal fishermen to sell their catch. Image-Mary Randlett
“The Fisheries people were bad, but the Game Department was really awful, real thugs,” remembers Tom Keefe. “They were always out there on behalf of the white steelhead fishermen, harassing Indian fishermen, cutting loose their nets. The Game Department people just thought that it was basically blasphemous for anyone to be catching steelhead with nets and selling them. In their view, steelhead were supposed to be reserved for so-called sportsmen, who were non- Indian people who didn’t want to mow their lawns on the weekends, and would rather leave their wives and kids at home and go stand testicle- deep in freezing water with a fishing pole trying to catch a steelhead as some iconic rite of passage. And they became a political force in our state.”
One night after the sun set, Billy’s father walked outside and discovered state officers hovering at the Landing. “They’re pulling your nets—the game wardens!” Willie shouted to his son.
