The Boldt Decision of 1974 and the Fish Wars Behind It

In the autumn of 1965, state game wardens in Washington waded into the Nisqually River with nightsticks and pulled Native fishermen out of their canoes. The fishermen were setting nets where their families had fished for generations, at a place called Frank's Landing, under a treaty the United States had signed with their nations in 1854. The state called it poaching. The fishermen called it exercising a right that had been paid for with millions of acres of land.

That conflict, which came to be known as the Fish Wars, ran for more than a decade before a federal judge named George Boldt settled the legal question in 1974. The Boldt decision is one of the most important rulings in the history of Native treaty rights, and outside the Pacific Northwest it is barely taught. I think that gap matters, because the case shows what it takes to make a promise written on paper actually hold.

The treaty language at the centre of it

Between 1854 and 1856, Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, negotiated a series of treaties with the tribes around Puget Sound and the coast. The Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854 was the first, followed by Point Elliott, Point No Point, Neah Bay, Quinault and others. In each, the tribes gave up most of their land. In return they kept reservations and a set of rights, including one sentence that would be argued over for more than a hundred years.

The treaties promised the tribes "the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations, in common with all citizens of the Territory." For the tribal negotiators, fishing was not a side issue. Salmon was the core of the economy, diet and ceremonial life. Keeping access to the rivers was the reason many agreed to sign at all.

The state of Washington later read "in common with all citizens" to mean that Native fishermen had the same rights as anyone else, and so had to follow state licensing, seasons and gear rules. In practice that meant tribal fishers were arrested for fishing at their traditional sites with traditional nets, while commercial and sport fleets took the large majority of the catch further downstream and out at sea.

The Fish Wars, and the people who kept fishing

The response from Native fishermen was to keep fishing, openly, and accept arrest. Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually man who had first been arrested for fishing at the age of fourteen in 1945, became the best known face of that resistance. By his own count he was arrested more than fifty times over the following decades. The site at Frank's Landing, a small piece of land his father owned on the Nisqually, became the centre of the protests.

The tactic was called a fish-in, modelled partly on the sit-ins of the civil rights movement. In 1964 the actor Marlon Brando joined one on the Puyallup River and was arrested, which brought national press attention for the first time. Comedian Dick Gregory took part later and served time in jail. These moments drew cameras, but the people who carried the struggle were tribal families who were arrested again and again without any cameras present.

The confrontations were not symbolic. In September 1970, police raided a fishing camp on the Puyallup River with tear gas and arrested around sixty people. Nets and boats were seized. Women in the camps, including Ramona Bennett of the Puyallup Tribe, were among those arrested. That raid helped push the federal government to file suit against the state later that same year.

What Judge Boldt actually ruled

The case was United States v. Washington, filed by the federal government on behalf of the tribes in 1970. Judge George Hugo Boldt heard it in federal district court in Tacoma, and issued his ruling on February 12, 1974. It ran to more than 200 pages.

Boldt studied the historical record closely, including dictionaries from the 1850s and testimony about how the treaties had been explained to tribal leaders through Chinook Jargon, a trade language with only a few hundred words. He concluded that "in common with" meant sharing, and he looked up how the word was used at the time. Sharing meant an equal division. The tribes were entitled to the opportunity to take up to 50 percent of the harvestable fish passing through their usual and accustomed places.

He also ruled that the state could regulate tribal fishing only when necessary for conservation, and only if it did not discriminate against the tribes. The tribes that had shown they could manage their own fisheries could regulate their own members. That piece is the one that grew into modern co-management.

The backlash, and why winning in court was not the end

It is tempting to tell this as a story that ends in 1974 with justice delivered. That version is too neat, and I think it does a disservice to the people who kept fighting after the ruling. In the years that followed, the state and many non-Native fishermen simply refused to comply.

Judge Boldt was hanged in effigy. Bumper stickers appeared calling for him to be removed or worse. Non-Native commercial fishers fished in closed areas in open defiance, and Washington state agencies and courts resisted enforcing the ruling. For several seasons, federal officials had to step in and manage parts of the fishery directly, because the state would not. The conflict ran on until the US Supreme Court largely upheld the decision in 1979, in Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association.

So the case does not show that treaty rights win once they reach a courtroom. It shows that a ruling is only as strong as the willingness to enforce it, and that the gap between those can last years. The pattern is familiar from how treaty rights survived centuries of broken promises more broadly. Rights on paper became rights in practice only through persistent and costly effort.

What it made possible

The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission was created in 1974, shortly after the ruling, to help the treaty tribes manage fisheries together. Today around twenty tribes take part, and they co-manage salmon with the state. Billy Frank Jr. chaired the commission for more than thirty years until his death in 2014. The same man who was dragged out of the river by wardens spent the second half of his life sitting across a table from those agencies, negotiating catch limits.

The ruling also opened a second phase of litigation. Tribes argued that a right to take fish means little if there are no fish, and that the state had damaged salmon runs by building road culverts that blocked spawning streams. In 2007 a federal judge agreed, and in 2013 he ordered the state to fix hundreds of culverts. When the case reached the US Supreme Court in 2018, the justices split 4 to 4, leaving that ruling in place. Washington is now spending billions of dollars replacing culverts over a period of years.

That link between rights and habitat runs through other modern fights too, including the long campaign that led to the removal of the Klamath River dams. The legal reasoning traces back, in part, to the question Boldt asked about what "in common with" was supposed to mean.

If you teach or study this history, one useful step is to read the actual treaty text of the Medicine Creek Treaty, which runs only a few pages, then read the opening sections of the 1974 ruling. Seeing how a single phrase was read in two completely different ways is the clearest lesson I know of in why the wording of treaties still matters.

FAQ

What was the Boldt decision?

It was the 1974 federal court ruling in United States v. Washington. Judge George Boldt held that treaty tribes in western Washington had the right to up to half the harvestable fish at their usual and accustomed fishing places.

Who was Billy Frank Jr.?

He was a Nisqually fisherman and activist arrested more than fifty times for fishing under treaty rights. He later chaired the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission for over three decades.

Did the Supreme Court uphold the Boldt decision?

Yes. In 1979 the Supreme Court largely upheld the 50 percent allocation, after years of resistance from the state of Washington and non-Native fishing groups.

What are the Fish Wars?

The name for the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s in the Pacific Northwest, when Native fishermen held fish-ins and faced arrests while asserting their treaty right to fish.