“They had billy clubs made out of lead pipe,” Willie Frank recalled.
Indian activists accused the state of “carrying nightsticks” to “snuff out” a fish-in. When officers tried to arrest fishermen, the Indians pelted them with rocks and sticks, screaming: “You’re on federal land.”
Battle of Frank’s Landing on October 13,
1965. Image-Hank Adams Collection
Decades after the attack, Billy’s niece Alison remembered her confrontation with a state officer: “There was a huge log that came out of the river. And, my sister and I were standing there and this game warden, he grabbed me by the hair and he started to slam my head into the log. . . . So my sister was fighting with him . . . and we got up to the cars and they were arresting my mom. . . . They were hitting my dad in the back with those brass knuckles. . . . They were clubbing him and hitting him. . . . One of the game wardens turned around and he just punched my sister in the face . . . the blood was just spurting out. I was thirteen.”
Don Hannula, a much-admired beat reporter for the News Tribune and later the Seattle Times, recalled no drinking of any kind, and “if there was any brutality, it was by shoving the children,” he observed. Hannula “criticized the state quite strongly for playing into the hands of the Indians.”
He wasn’t alone. The state took more lashings from Representative Hal Wolf of Yelm. A box boy at Wolf’s grocery store got a phone call from a relative back east “concerned about the Indian uprising.”
Wolf accused the state of giving Washington a bad name and hung news clippings of the skirmish on his office walls. Wolf said he was assured that fishermen would be observed only and arrested later to avoid the very outcome that occurred.
Jim Siburg witnessed the incident with his wife and children: “The thing that upset me so about it was the way the state people came in there and the guys were around with billy clubs and they would gang up on these poor little Indians. The guy they hustled off first couldn’t have weighed more than 125 pounds. They must have had four or five guys. The guy hustling him to the car had a sap hanging out of his pocket. The state people should have maintained a cooler atmosphere.
“I saw one of the state people pick up a little girl, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, by the hair. She had probably been throwing rocks at him.”
The observations, though conflicting, were starting to sway public opinion toward the Indians. “We have received letters of support and donations from all over the world,” Janet McCloud told Hannula.
“Regarding the state’s treatment of Indians . . . I think it was intentionally vicious and racist, probably from the time Washington became a state,” says Susan Hvalsoe Komori, a former attorney for the Nisqually Tribe. “The Game Department really wanted to eradicate Indians in the years I lived out there. They regarded the fishery resource as their own—especially steelhead.”
