In the fall of 1965, Al Bridges set a net in the Nisqually River, near Frank’s Landing. “He was so happy being on this river fishing,” Billy remembers. “And that was his life, and the life of all of our brothers and nieces, and all of them. They give their life to this river.”
Bridges was a real mentor to Billy, his closest fishing companion and brother-in-law. He was kind and serious, once characterized by the Seattle Times as a man without a country. Bridges was rejected by his tribe and “hounded” by the state. He spent as much time as Billy exercising his treaty rights early on, if not more. “The Indian is more free when he’s fishing on the river,” Bridges said in the documentary Treaties Made, Treaties Broken. “He’s apart from the whole country. I mean, you’re way up here all alone, you’re not punching a clock in the city to go to work at 8 in the morning and get off at 4:30 and somebody’s riding you all day. But the white man is trying to get all of us to leave the reservation and go to the city. And I can go to the city of Seattle right now and I can find you Indians by the thousands on skid row up there. And now they don’t own nothing. Nobody wants them. They’re nothing but bums.”
“Al, you want to go down and set your net?” Billy called out from his dugout canoe on that October day.
“Yeah, just wait till I get this anchored.” The fishermen climbed into Billy’s twenty-two-foot cedar canoe.
The expert fishermen approached the mouth of the Nisqually River. As they set Bridges’s net, Billy spotted a wealth of silvers in his own. That’s when he heard a motor in the distance.
“God damn! These guys are after us. Run to the front of the boat, Bridges,” Billy yelled.
The tactic was called boat ramming. A patrol boat slammed into his canoe, spilling Billy and Bridges headfirst into the water. “Those bastards rammed us at full speed, and knocked us clean over. We had our hip boots on and it was harder’n hell to swim. I honestly thought I was going to drown,” Billy said.
Billy had grown up on the river and respected its force and swiftness. Each year, the river dragged down some unlucky fisherman after water filled his boots. Even experienced fishermen lost their energy. Billy, swathed in heavy raingear and hip boots, knew for all his time on the river he was not above an accident.
Officers caught up to Billy and Al. They handcuffed the soaking-wet fishermen and carted them off to Pierce County jail. Billy sat for hours on a concrete bunk. His clothes dripped. The water in his hip boots chilled his feet.
