Page 20 - Pierce County Lawyer - September October 2025

As salmon runs declined, the state cracked down on Indian fishing – even as it granted
commercial fishing licenses to gill-netters for as little as $15 a day with no daily catch
limit. The department’s regulations, as framed and enforced, allowed all or a large portion
of the harvestable numbers of fish to be taken by fishermen with no treaty rights before
the fish reached tribes’ usual and accustomed fishing areas. The state also was closing
off entirely a substantial number of those areas to all forms of net fishing, while permitting
commercial net fishing for salmon elsewhere on the same fish populations.
This, as Billy Frank, Jr. told Charles Wilkinson, was a war: with guns, clubs, chase boats
and night vision scopes, state game wardens pursued tribal fishermen, sinking their boats
and cutting their nets.
Judge George Boldt presided over
three years of pretrial.
Barbara Lane, an anthropologist by
training, was the tribes’ expert witness.
She remained cool under questioning and
definitive in her answers as she spelled
out the fishing traditions of the tribes, their
meaning and importance. Boldt listened as
well to hours of testimony by tribal elders
as to their fishing traditions and culture.
John Hughes, now chief historian in the
Washington Secretary of State’s Office,
was in the courtroom. “There are certain
moments in your life where 50 years on,
you can remember exactly what it was
like.” Hughes said. “If I close my eyes, I
can hear Barbara Lane’s voice. I can hear
all the voices as they put the tribal elders on the stand. And I can see the look on Boldt’s
face. He was absolutely rapt.”
The Judge’s decision affirmed the tribes’ reserved treaty right to fish. But he also
enumerated the share of the catch “in common with” the citizens as half the harvestable
number of fish (after the amount needed to return to spawning grounds) – to be
determined by co-management of the fishery.
The decision, announced almost five months later, was front page news in Seattle
and beyond (though not nationally) – and reactions across the region were intense.
Tribes had won-but were affirmed in their right to half the catch, not all of it. Bennett still
remembers leaping from her desk so fast when she heard the news that she landed in
the trash can saying, “We just lost half our fish.”
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1. The number of fish necessary for
spawning escapement or other
requirements necessary for conservation
of the species;
2. The number of harvestable fish non-
Treaty fishermen may take at the tribe’s
“usual and accustomed grounds and
stations” while fishing in common with
“Treaty-Right fishermen”.
Presently, except for the alternating years where the
Puyallup River has a run of salmon, known locally
as “humpies” the river has only a marginal run of
silvers and kings and steelhead as compared to the
years prior to the Boldt decision. This reduction
in the number of fish cannot be attributed entirely
to the Boldt decision. Others have stated that
the amount of construction along the river, the
commercial fishing in the marine offshore waters
of the Pacific Ocean and Puget Sound and various
other sources of contention all contribute to the
decline of these runs of fish.
Prior to the Boldt decision, during any weekend in
January or February, Puyallup River steelheaders
would arise one hour, or more, before daylight, grab
a cup of coffee and head to the “S curves” on the
Sumner/Orting Highway or drive to the Clay Banks
or the stretch of river below Anton's Restaurant
in order to get a spot on the river. If one were to
arrive after daylight, there would be a lineup of
fishermen already fishing the river for steelhead
or salmon and there would probably be no room
for additional fishermen on any of the good gravel
bars. There would probably already be big “slabs”
(big fish) caught laying on the gravel bar awaiting
transportation to the fisherman’s home. Presently,
there are so few steelhead in the river that the only
reason one might want to drive to the river would be
to float “rubber duckies” or handmade paper boats
in the river. For all intents and purposes, there is
little steelhead fishing left and nothing to compare
to the days before all of this demonstration activity
occurred on the rivers. Interestingly enough, the
relationship between the Indian Tribes and the
sport fishermen has probably improved a little and
now there is another contest unfolding and that is
between fishermen opposed to state-run hatcheries
placing hatchery fish in the rivers. Their contention
is that the hatchery fish will harm the genetics of the
native fish by adversely affecting their survivability.
I visited a presentation that “the Historical Society”
gave at the State History Museum. I attached
photographs taken at this exhibit. In one of these
photographs one can see a group of sport fishermen
expressing their attitude about the Boldt decision.
In the very initial stages in this demonstrations, I
represented a small group of fishermen. However,