J. Johnson, publisher and editor of the Auburn Citizen, boarded a plane for Washington, D.C., and warned the Interior Department: “If something isn’t done somebody is going to get killed.” Johnson was taken seriously but turned away and told, “Only the state had authority.”
The state’s new chief executive, Dan Evans, had taken the helm that January. “Your first impression of this is we’ve got to stop the violence. We’ve got to stop this kind of unlawful behavior. It was the Game Department Police really—the game agents—that were engaged in this uproar and war on the river.”
In his early days as Governor, Evans says he backed the state in its regulations of off-reservation net fishing. He recalls telling Billy, a young activist at the time, “You’ve got to follow the law. And the law is that this [steelhead] is a game fish and you shouldn’t be fishing it.”
After October 13, on-duty officers with the departments of Game and Fisheries faced serious charges. A doctor accused one officer of hitting him in the stomach with a nightstick and drinking on the job. Evans demanded a full report.
“I didn’t like what was going on, didn’t like the violence and talked to the Game people and they said thank you very much but the Game Commission is telling us this is what we want to do,” he recalls. “I tried to talk with them and to see if there wasn’t a way out. And they were determined to break this thing. They were determined that steelhead were game fish, they were being supported by the sport fishermen and the sportsmen’s organization. The hunting organizations all joined in. They were all on the side of the Game Department. I do remember going to the head of the Game Department and saying this can’t go on. We look terrible.”
Thrown sticks, rocks, and clubs outside Billy’s home did enough damage in twenty minutes to result in stinging accusations against the state. Allegations of excessive force on the part of state officers were turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case went to trial.
A jury in Thurston County Superior Court deliberated for two hours and cleared seven Indians charged in the “Battle of Frank’s Landing.” Attorney Al Ziontz argued that the fish-in was a staged demonstration, a show, and the net they used was “virtually incapable of catching fish.” Therefore, the officers used excessive force, Ziontz said persuasively. Officers testified that “no nightsticks, long flashlights, or blackjacks were used.” However, Ziontz brandished “a blackjack confiscated by Indians at the time with name of a game warden on it” and entered pictures of officers with “nightsticks and flashlights” as evidence.
That particular court case ended, but the feud was far from over. According to Hank Adams, the state led some thirty attacks against fishermen on the lower Nisqually from 1962 through 1970; it made more than a hundred arrests of Native people on the Nisqually and Puyallup Rivers and at the Landing. The state continued its crackdown, and sports anglers weren’t about to give up. “The Indians and the sportsmen have been fighting on these rivers forever,” Billy’s brother, Andrew McCloud, once said. “We’ve gotten so fond of them as enemies, I guess we’ll never be able to think of them as friends.”
