Life went on while Willie was away. All of his parental figures and grandparents died during his time at Cushman—most notably Aunt Sally in 1895 and his father in 1896. Willie returned to Muck Creek to live with a granduncle. He picked hops. He tended to elders, the sick, and the homeless. On Sundays, the community held horse races. There were two racetracks on one side of the prairie and one racetrack on the other. The Indians played slahal, an ancient bluffing game in which teams try to identify marked deer bones hidden in players’ hands. “Slahal went on and they had a card game they called monte,” Willie recalled. “The men and women would play monte and slahal and the whole gang would have horse racing.”

Mostly, Willie fished. He’d catch his salmon in the Nisqually River and haul his fish into town in one of Henry Ford’s Model Ts that put America on wheels. One day in 1916, however, authorities hauled Willie into town. They accused him of unlawful salmon fishing. For Willie, the event marked the first episode in a sixty-six-year struggle for treaty fishing rights.

At the cusp of America’s entrance into World War I, a couple of businessmen propositioned the U.S. War Department with plans for a military base across a swath of prairie land near Tacoma, Pierce County. By an eight-to-one margin, local voters approved the necessary two million dollars in bonds to gift the land to the U.S. and  build Camp Lewis on roughly seventy thousand acres. A. V. Fawcett, then mayor of Tacoma, hyperbolically predicted, “Tacoma, the City of Destiny, is now ready to establish that destiny as a world power.” Camp Lewis included private lands and two-thirds of the Nisqually Indian Reservation east of the river. It included the home of Willie Frank.

Because reservation land is held in trust with the federal government, it requires congressional approval to be condemned. Nevertheless, plans for nearly eight hundred buildings and sixty thousand men marched forward in the spirit of war. Non-Indians and Indians alike were uprooted from their homes. The whites came to see Willie and several dozen families who lived on allotments. They showed up out of nowhere one night on his family’s 205 acres at Muck Creek, and then unloaded Indians into a shanty town: “Indian, he had to move out. . . . They brought the Army trucks from Fort Lewis and unloaded these old people and hauled them over on this side of the river, Thurston County side; unloaded them under the great big fir trees; got long limbs to stick out, and unloaded these old people under that tree.”

The fast-paced condemnation of the Nisqually Reservation stirred up interest in Congress. Although a 1920 report urged the government to return acreage to the Nisqually Tribe, Indians never reclaimed their homeland. In 1921, the Committee on Indian Affairs revealed that Pierce County had begun condemnation proceedings without the express knowledge of the Department of the Interior: “The records show that, unknown to the department, proceedings were instituted early in 1918 by the authorities of Pierce County, Wash., to condemn approximately 3,300 acres of allotted Indian land on the Nisqually Reservation for the purpose of turning the same over to the U.S. government for the use of the War Department in enlarging its activities at Camp Lewis.”

Further, the committee concluded, “The ambition of Tacoma to acquire one of the Army posts, and the war necessity, caused Pierce County, Washington, in April, 1918 to condemn the best two-thirds of the Nisqually Reservation, being the part east of the Nisqually [River] where most of the Nisqually homes were. The Indians were scattered to seek homes elsewhere. Such is the fate of the little band whose fathers fought against an unjust treaty to make secure their homes.”

Allottees were paid only $75,840 for the land. The committee proposed a second payment of another $85,000 to twenty-five families on the Nisqually Reservation. The payment compensated for loss of land, treaty rights, and the removal of Indian bodies from five reservation graveyards that were located on the condemned land. The families received their money. “Congress appropriated more money,” says George Walter, a longtime employee of the Nisqually Tribe. “Congress never really explicitly approved the condemnation, but they did implicitly approve a condemnation by saying that the compensation was inadequate and appropriating funds for compensation. So the Indian reservation still exists.”

“When they condemned our reservation for Fort Lewis and sent us across the river to become farmers they didn’t only condemn the land,” explains Georgiana Kautz, a feisty Nisqually and former tribal chair who grew up in hard times on the reservation. “They condemned the people and the language and the ceremonies . . . and the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] stood there and didn’t do a damn thing about it. No one did. We never got running water or electricity ’til ’69.”

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  billy Franks, spirit of the father, where the salmon run