The condemnation left Willie with eight thousand dollars in his pocket. Eventually, he used some of the money to buy more than six acres of land on the lower Nisqually River, downstream from the reservation and near the Tacoma-Olympia paved highway. “Ah, this is only land I could buy in the valley,” Willie recalled, “. . . got cheapest land; six acres cost me a thousand dollars. We got eight thousand dollars for our land; 205 acres we had.” The investment became a legacy. Over time, Willie’s six acres became one of the most talkedabout places in Puget Sound. “Never have to pay any tax on it,” Willie always said. “Just like the reservation . . . I built a nice little house.”
For Willie, the hardships kept right on coming. He’d married twice already and shortly after moving to his enclave, he buried his third wife, Josephine Pope. Pneumonia killed her in 1923. Three years after Josephine’s death, Willie lost his younger sister, forty-year-old Lizzie John.
Whites came for Willie again in 1936. They caught him fishing off the reservation without a license. “You can’t fish the river with a net, Willie Frank. It’s against the law,” whites had hollered at Willie. They routinely crept along the riverbank at dusk, pushing tree branches out of the way and peering through the brush for Indians who dared to fish.
“Well, maybe so, but I’ve got a treaty. . . . The Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854 with my people. . . . I’m Willie Frank, Nisqually Allottee No. 89.” Throughout his lifetime, Nisqually Allottee No. 89 watched as authorities arrested and interrogated his family. He later recalled a warden telling him, “Your treaty isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” Each time officers dragged someone he loved up the riverbank in handcuffs, Willie knew why. The traditions of the American Indian collided with the whites. “They got beat up, locked up, berated and belittled physically and verbally, inside and out,” says Hvalsoe Komori.
In 1937, Willie got his day in court. He secured an injunction to keep the state away from Indian fishermen. “That was the time that he started fighting for the river,” says family. “And he got into federal court, and got an injunction.” The injunction held through 1944.
Through the years, Willie kept right on fighting. “From the days of his adolescence when he fished, and worked in the woods and the hop fields, he labored for all Indian people, particularly young people. . . . People who come into Frank’s Landing would gain strength to take into the world,” Hank Adams says.
Eventually, rheumatism got the best of Willie’s hands. In 1954, he caught his very last fish. His legs grew too stiff for the canoe, the water too cold for his hands. His eyes dimmed with age. “I don’t see too good now,” Willie explained. “I walked right off the end of my darn canoe. I knew it was time to quit.”
He may have stopped pulling net, but Willie walked around with a cane tapping on the trees so they knew he was still there. He never did run out of steam. He never gave up on the Nisqually River that springs from the southern side of Tahoma. He never gave up on the salmon. He never gave up on the Treaty of Medicine Creek that protected his way of life. Deep down, underneath the skin of the Nisqually Indian, Willie Frank was a warrior. That’s how the elder wound up on the witness stand at the age of 103. His history made him a legend, Gramps to all in his presence.
The case officially ended with Judge Grossman’s termination order in 1993, ten years after Gramps’s death. Grossman ruled in favor of the Indian people, observing the powerful link between Gramps and his son: “Mr. Frank recalled the river’s former majesty and importance to the Nisqually Tribe and eloquently expressed his desire for restoration of that irreplaceable resource. . . . His spirit and vision, however, live on in his son, Billy Frank Jr.”
By all accounts, Gramps’s fight for the Indians of Puget Sound was in fact too intense and too long for a single lifetime. He bottled his passion for the Indian way and passed it on.
As the legend holds, every fifty years or so, a violent storm ravages Indian Country near the southernmost tip of Puget Sound, where the salmon run. Out of the ashes a Nisqually Indian appears, a baby boy bearing the name William Frank. If the tale has any truth, March 9, 1931, doubtlessly saw a record-breaker of immense proportions. The date marks the birth of an unparalleled warrior. His name is Klucket- sah, but most people just call him Billy.
Tomorrow-Chapter Two “I live Here!”
