The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

122 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
in Portland that gave the tribes that fished the Columbia greater leeway.
Evans ordered the Fisheries Department to make available a greater volume
of fish to Indian fishermen and allow nets in some rivers. The Game
Department, however, was beyond his control. Its management was adamant
that there would be no net fishing by Indians. 4
The federal Justice Department, under a Nixon Administration sympathetic
to the tribes, zeroed in on a “much bigger target: the regulatory
system for all fisheries of western Washington—Puget Sound. . . .” 5
The lawsuit filed by the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington
State in September of 1970 was U.S. v. Washington, but when the
judge who presided released his ruling some 31⁄2 years later it would be
forever known as The Boldt Decision.
Bald, bow-tied and upright, George Hugo Boldt of the U.S. District
Court in Tacoma was nearing 70. Earlier in his career he had dressed
down Teamsters Union boss Dave Beck before sentencing him to McNeil
Island federal penitentiary for corruption. A few weeks after the fishing
rights case was filed, several members of the radical anti-war Seattle Liberation
Front were being tried in Boldt’s courtroom on charges of inciting
a riot at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle. One of the defiant
defendants accused the judge of being “a lying dog.” Outraged at their disrespect
for the court, Boldt admonished them for their “contumacious”
remarks. One day he summoned 20 federal marshals to restore order.
When a mace-spraying melee ensued, Boldt declared a mistrial. He found
the defendants in contempt of court, sentenced them to six months to a
year in prison and refused to grant bail. 6
Hank Adams, a DeLaCruz protégé who was a key strategist for the
tribes, was so worried about the possible outcome of a decision by Boldt
in the fishing rights dispute that he flew to Washington, D.C., to ask the
government to drop the case. The tribes’ attorneys had deep misgivings
of their own. But to Gorton’s surprise and the outrage of white fishermen,
Judge Boldt gave the tribes far more than they expected. 7
it tooK neARLy thRee yeARs for the case to come to trial. Judge Boldt’s
initial utterances from the bench were classics in jurisprudentialese—
100–word sentences that defy diagramming. He appeared to listen intently,
however, and from time to time offered sympathetic observations.
When a salt-of-the-earth Indian witness confessed that he “couldn’t make
it past the eighth grade without cheating,” the judge allowed, “I wouldn’t
be surprised if the rest of us had that same problem.” 8
Boldt seemed particularly impressed by the testimony of Dr. Barbara