The Klamath River Salmon Wars

The two-hundred-mile-long Klamath River empties south of the old Klamath townsite, and some 50-plus miles above is the town of Johnson. Between these two points that in 1975 the Klamath River Salmon War began.

Real bullets crisscrossed the Klamath at times, Indians firing at the white man, Indians at Indians, cops at violators. In the summer of 1978, a White canoeist was shot in the back far upriver, and downriver a volunteer fire department, ironically named Yurok VDF, had a rescue truck damaged beyond repair because of gunfire.

And like the Vietnam War, this one had no out-and-out bad guys unless it was “the U.S. government.”

On one side were the sportsman, resort owners, local law enforcement, and much of the 3,800-member Yurok tribe of the lower 50 miles of the Klamath. On the other side were 20 “commercial” gill-netters, mostly Yuroks, and their backer, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA.) In the middle were 1,400 Hoopa Indians who occupied a 12-mile-square reservation upriver from the Yuroks and another 500 Karuk Indians still further upstream.

Many believed that without a solution, and before the 1979 salmon run started, fishing on the Klamath was at an end. The reason was that since 1975, in an exercise of “traditional Indian fishing rights,” a small group of Indians and non-Indians had been gill netting the river so heavily that the salmon may have reached the point of no return.

The netters weren’t fishing for “subsistence,” a term that would seem to mean home consumption, but for money. They have been selling their catches for prices up to $6 a pound, in defiance of a 1933 California state law that forbids commercial salmon fishing in any of the states’ once salmon-thick rivers, and with the approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The origin of the problem dates back to about 1891 when some five northern California Indian tribes were given the Hoopa Reservation on the Klamath. But it was not until 1969, when California Fish and Game officers busted Raymond Mattz for gill netting on the Klamath, that things came to a head.

In 1972 Mattz took Arnett vs. Five Gill Nets et al. to the U.S. Supreme Court, and though saying nothing about Indians fishing in violation of state law, it did rule that the lower Klamath, the 50 miles below the so-called Hoopa Square was part of the reservation. That same year, a Washington state decision clarified the rights of “treaty” Indians living along the Columbia River drainage to fish for salmon without regulation.

In 1975 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the state had no power to interfere with Indian fishing rights on the reservation unless such regulations were needed to conserve the resource. Then in May 1979, a U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids ruled similarly in a case involving Chippewa Indian gill netters, upholding the rights granted by treaties signed in 1836 and 1855.

However, an executive order created the Hoopa Reservation, not a treaty process.

Nonetheless, Mattz and the other “commercial” fishermen on the Klamath argued that until that time, no one had interfered with gill netting. During the summer salmon run of 1975, Mattz and a few dozen of his fellow Indians began fishing “commercially,” with the BIA doing nothing to stop them.

The government’s reason for not interfering came from questionable data claiming Yuroks traded salmon for deerskins and other items with other tribes before the White man arrived. The policy led to outrage among sports fishermen and the resort owners and who, under the leadership of former San Francisco 49er Ed Henke, formed “The Klamath/Trinity River Coalition, Inc.”

Then there was the Jessie Short case.

In the early 1950s, the BIA decided that the midriver Hoopa Square was one reservation and that the “Yurok Extension,” the 50 miles of river below the square, were separate reservations. The bureaucrat-made dictum deprived 3,800 Yuroks of timber valued at $200 million.

White man and former Eureka, Cal. police detective Allan Morris married a Yurok woman named Fawn Williams. He took on the role of adviser to the Yuroks and sued the BIA.

In 1973 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Morris’ advisee, a woman named Jessie Short, and 3,300 other claimants, who were not all full-blooded Yuroks but residents of the extension. The court said that the two reservations were one and that the Yuroks had at least $16 million coming to them.

But then the Court of Appeals could not decide which of the 3,300 litigants was a true Yurok. Meanwhile, Morris and his wife, and many other Yuroks refused to set up a tribal organization until they could do so in tandem with the Hoopa council.

Meanwhile, Bob and Jenny Bostick, the owners of Kamp Klamath, an RV park on the lower river catering to the fishing trade, along with other resort owners, sued U.S. Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus, the Department of the Interior, and the BIA for failing to correctly prepare an environmental impact statement before the BIA authorized “commercial” gill netting in August 1977. In addition, the coalition filed a claim asking for $1.25 million in damages.

What damaged resort owners most was a compromise between the BIA and California. In August 1978, with the concurrence of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency, without consulting the resort owners, imposed a moratorium on all fishing, commercial, and sports, except for “traditional” Indian subsistence netting.

Then on Tue., Sep. 5, 1978, while working on a drug case, Del Norte County Sheriff deputies stopped a truck on Highway 101 carrying 650 salmon and one steelhead worth some $60,000 to $70,000. The fish, they learned, were being sold illegally as far away as New York City.

As for the Yurok Volunteer Fire Department rescue truck, I was seated in the front passenger seat when the vehicle’s engine compartment was struck 11 times by a high-powered rifle fired from across the river. My father, then the department’s fire chief, was behind the wheel.

Though shaken up, either one of us was hurt.