Indian fisherman. Image-Washington State Archives
Billy chased after them as they rowed away with two of his nets inside their boat. He jumped in his car and intercepted the officers at a nearby landing.“I went down and had a fight with them. I pulled them nets out of their car. My dog salmon are all over the ground. I said, ‘You sons of bitches! You guys are stealing my net and stealing my fish!’ And they were hollering at me. And there was a MP standing there, a military police guy. And I said, ‘Are you in this, son of a bitch?’ He never said anything. I pulled them fish and put them in the back of my—I only had a coupe that I was in, a Chevrolet coupe, with a trunk. And I was throwing my fish and the net back in the car. They took one net and I got the other one. They didn’t arrest me that time.”
In addition to his personal encounters, Billy says the state followed, roughed up, and mistreated his family. One night after dark, his niece Alison Bridges woke as a spotlight cast shadows and crept across her bedroom wall. “I’d wake up at two in the morning and there would be huge spotlights going up and down the river and they’d be looking for my dad,” she said.
Her father, Al Bridges, went to jail so often that Alison and her two sisters started fishing in his absence. They would push off from the shore at night dressed in black clothing. Crouching inside a small boat, they drifted by wardens silently. Every time an officer puffed on a cigarette, the girls could make out his profile. They weren’t the only women or children suffering. Many, like Billy’s niece Nancy Shippentower-Games, lived in poverty: “We didn’t have no food, and our dads were in jail. When I went to see [my father], I had shoes that were falling apart.” The families hawked motors, sold pop cans, and tolerated a lot of bologna and bread. When food was especially scant, the women showered at dinner time; their hunger pains couldn’t take the smell of food.
As the surveillance of Indian fishers continued for years, Willie and Angeline Frank showed their resilience. “Mom and Dad . . . they were our security,” says Maiselle McCloud Bridges. “We’d sit down and talk about day’s events at the courthouse. We were drained. We’d be able to forget. We were just home with them and we felt safe.”
