oderate Republican is a legend in Washington politics, with forty volumes of scrapbooks documenting his trials and triumphs. He is a three-term governor, a one-term U.S. senator, and a one-time serious contender for the vice presidency.
When Evans took over the governor’s office in 1965, you could have tripped over the disgruntled citizens climbing the Capitol steps.
“We were just on the eve of the fish wars,” Evans remembers. “I ran into all of this almost immediately, not what I expected. I first met his dad, Bill Frank, who lived to be a hundred. He was still pretty active at that time, and his son, Billy, was kind of a firebrand. The whole thing started on the Nisqually with the Game Department. The Game Department was run by the Game Commission, a seven-member commission, all of whom had been appointed by my predecessor. So I had no real power over the Game Commission until I started appointing my own members.”
“The sportsmen and just the ‘good old boys’ of this network of white people—they had their own way so long,” Billy recalls. “They fished whenever they wanted. The Washington Department of Game was a private sports enforcement agency put up by the state of Washington, and it was to protect the sportsmen.”
Evans’s knowledge of Indian issues garnered during eight years in the state house of representatives—four of which he spent as Republican leader—paid off. But Evans says he still had a lot to learn.
You could have heard a pin drop when the governor walked into one of his first meetings with the tribal leaders in the mid-1960s. The governor’s conference room was usually the setting for press conferences and meetings with dignitaries, and it looked the part. Velvet window treatments framed campus views. Grand chandeliers hung above a long table, with Evans’s chair—the tallest of fourteen—sitting prominently at one end. On this day, not a single smile greeted the governor. No one spoke a word. Evans noted a large number of tribal members—many in full regalia—flanking the table.
“When you have meetings like this, even with groups that are antagonistic or that have problems, there is usually a little banter before you get started,” Evans says. “This was pretty grim. I realized that they had been through many meetings like this going way, way back and in every one they’d come away empty-handed.”
Evans, in 1998, testified before the U.S. Senate about those early years as governor and the Washington State Indian Affairs Commission he appointed by executive authority in 1967: “Tribal leaders of the many tribes in Washington State gathered and listened solemnly and without expression to my initial proposals for closer cooperation and respect. They brought with them the century of broken promises and lies which represented their previous experience with governmental leaders.”
“Over the years, I grew to really admire and respect the tribes and got really very close to an awful lot of the tribal leaders as time went on,” Evans says today. “That initial skepticism began to diminish as we began to make some progress. It took years.”
The head of the Game Department, John Biggs, was pulled in every direction. “I was pounding on him on one side,” Evans says. “The Game Commission were some of the Good Old Boys and they were all hunters and fishermen. The Game Department, obviously, represented the sport hunters and the sport fisherman.”
