Billy Frank Jr. was fourteen years old the first time state game wardens arrested him for fishing on the Nisqually River. It was 1945. He was fishing the same waters his father had fished, and his grandfather, and his ancestors for thousands of years before that. The treaties signed by Governor Isaac Stevens in 1854 and 1855 had guaranteed the tribes the right to fish at their "usual and accustomed grounds and stations." Billy Frank was at his usual and accustomed grounds. The state of Washington disagreed.
He would be arrested more than fifty times over the next three decades.
The conflict was straightforward in principle and ugly in practice. The treaties said the tribes had the right to fish. The state said its conservation laws took priority. As commercial fishing and hydroelectric dams reduced salmon runs throughout the twentieth century, the state increasingly restricted when, where, and how Native fishermen could fish, while allowing non-Native commercial and sport fishermen to continue largely unchecked. The tribes saw this as a violation of their treaty rights. The state saw the tribes as a threat to a declining resource. The fact that the resource was declining mostly because of dams and overfishing by non-Natives was not something the state spent much time discussing.
By the 1960s, the confrontation had escalated into what became known as the Fish Wars. Native fishermen held "fish-ins," deliberately fishing in defiance of state regulations to draw attention to their treaty rights. The tactic was borrowed from the civil rights sit-ins happening across the South, and it drew some of the same supporters. Marlon Brando showed up at a fish-in on the Puyallup River in 1964. Dick Gregory was arrested alongside tribal fishermen. The national press started paying attention.
The state's response was not gentle. Game wardens rammed fishing boats. Fishermen were tear-gassed. Nets were slashed. People were beaten and arrested. At one confrontation on the Puyallup River, officers used clubs on Native fishermen while their families watched from the banks. The state threw its enforcement apparatus at the tribes with an intensity that suggested the issue was about something larger than fish.
Frank was in the middle of all of it, fishing and getting arrested and fishing again, over and over, for years. He was not a lawyer or a politician. He was not a man who gave speeches or sought attention. He was a fisherman who believed the treaty meant what it said, and he was willing to go to jail as many times as it took to prove it.
In 1970, the United States government filed suit against the state of Washington on behalf of the tribes. The case, United States v. Washington, was assigned to a federal judge named George Hugo Boldt. For three years, Boldt reviewed the treaties, the historical record, and the testimony of tribal leaders, fisheries experts, and historians. He read the original treaty language. He studied what the words "in common with" meant in the context of the 1850s. He took the work seriously in a way that no court before him had.
On February 12, 1974, Boldt issued his decision. The treaties, he ruled, entitled the tribes to up to fifty percent of the harvestable fish in their traditional fishing areas. The word "in common with," which the state had always interpreted to mean that Indians could fish alongside everyone else under state rules, actually meant that the fish were to be shared equally. Half for the tribes. Half for everyone else. The treaties were not suggestions. They were the law.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. Non-Native fishermen burned Boldt in effigy. They hung him from a mock gallows at a protest rally. Bumper stickers reading "Can Judge Boldt" appeared on trucks across the state. State officials initially refused to enforce the ruling. Some state fisheries agents openly defied the decision, continuing to arrest tribal fishermen even after the court had declared their right to fish. It took years of follow-up litigation, a Supreme Court affirmation in 1979, and repeated federal intervention before the decision was fully implemented.
The resistance to the Boldt Decision was not really about fish. It was about who had power and who did not. The treaties had promised something specific, and for over a century, the promise had been ignored because the people it was made to did not have the political power to enforce it. When a federal judge finally said the promise was real, the reaction from the people who had been benefiting from its violation was fury.
Billy Frank Jr. became one of the most prominent Native American rights leaders in the Pacific Northwest. He led the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission for decades, working not just on fishing rights but on habitat restoration, salmon recovery, and the broader principle that treaty rights and environmental health were the same fight. He was not an angry man. People who met him described him as warm, funny, and patient in a way that seemed almost impossible given what he had been through.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, a year after his death at age eighty three. The medal citation called him "a warrior for justice." The Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge was renamed in his honor in 2015. A statue of him now stands in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, one of two figures representing Washington State.
He probably would have preferred being called a fisherman.