Olympia Time

Just before Christmas 1929, Quinault tribal fishermen pulled winter steelhead out of the Quinault River on their reservation. They harvested about 1,724 pounds of fish, iced them at Taholah, and packed them into fourteen large wooden boxes, each weighing over 120 pounds.

Someone stenciled an address on the outside of every box: New England Fish Company, New York City. Ironically, because New York City is not in New England.

Pioneer Packing Company, a fish dealer out of Aberdeen, bought the nearly ton of fish on the reservation, a detail that turned out to be crucial. Pioneer hired Star Transfer Company to haul the boxes 40 miles down to the express shipping office in Aberdeen. From there, they’d start the long journey east.

The steelhead made it as far as the express office. Jack Winslow, the Grays Harbor County game warden, was waiting. He seized all fourteen crates on the spot.

Winslow pointed to Washington state game laws, which banned selling or transporting river-caught steelhead for money. The state considered steelhead caught in rivers to be “game fish,” which meant they were for sportsmen only. These fish were bought for profit and headed across state lines.

To see why a county warden felt empowered to arrest the travel of gamefish in a public shipping office, we have to go back a few years. We need to look at when steelhead stopped being seen as everyday food.

Before the 1920s, when local papers wrote about steelhead, they listed a price per pound, along with clams and oysters. The fish was simply a market commodity, processed by canneries and harvested by non-Native netters and tribal fishermen.

Things shifted after World War I. A growing middle class had spare time and money for gear. Some began viewing steelhead primarily as sport rather than dinner. Anglers are different from other fishermen because they “angle.” If I were explaining this to you in person, I would move my arm up and down, bending at the elbow to create a corner. These anglers started organizing in the 1920s. They wanted steelhead separated from commercial fisheries and reclassified as a “game” fish.

If you ask steelhead anglers why they’re obsessed, they’ll give you a quick answer. The fish gets built in the open ocean. It pulls hard and leaps when hooked. Catching one means reading river currents and casting for hours in freezing rain. One bite makes the misery worth it.

And this is all different from other river-born, ocean-raised fish in the Pacific salmon universe. 

While I have thought hard about the differences between Chinook and steelhead, I have come to understand it’s all subjective. You’ll have to take their word for it.

The name “steelhead” itself also stands out. Even compared to Chinook or sockeye, “steelhead” sounds tough. Commercial crews gave them the name because their heads were hard to knock out on deck.

By the 1920s, the fish were also actually disappearing. Logging stripped watersheds, and dams blocked rivers. Upper-middle-class sportsmen also held real political power. They pushed for state laws that favored recreation over commercial harvests to preserve their share of the shrinking pie.

In 1925, the state legislature passed a compromise. They named steelhead a game fish, but only upstream from river mouths. Estuaries and saltwater stayed open to commercial fishermen. Sportsmen wanted a full ban, so they kept pushing.

Three years later, in January 1928, anglers met at the Wilsonian Hotel in Seattle. They formed the Steelhead Trout Club of Washington. Their goals were straightforward: end commercial netting, ban river traps, and replace county wardens with one central state agency.

Maybe Jack Winslow, a county game warden, saw the writing on the wall and decided to show just how pro-gamefish a county game warden could be. That was the world he worked in when the boxes showed up in Aberdeen.

Pioneer Packing sued. Pioneer Packing Company v. Jack Winslow landed in county court in early 1930. Pioneer asked for a permanent court order to stop the warden from seizing fish bought on the reservation.

Lawyers for the Quinault Nation backed Pioneer. They argued that the Treaty of Olympia and federal precedent left the state zero power over tribal fisheries inside reservation borders.

The judge ruled for Pioneer Packing and granted the order. Winslow couldn’t touch the shipment.

But state officials refused to back down on regulating commercial fish shipments. Winslow appealed to the Washington Supreme Court.

The case turned on two points:

Did the Quinault own the fish in their rivers, or did the state own them for all citizens? 

Did the federal Commerce Clause protect selling reservation fish across state lines?

On December 29, 1930, over a year after the steelhead left the river, the state Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision upholding the order against Winslow. The court pointed to the Treaty of 1855 and an 1873 Executive Order. Under those agreements, the Quinault owned the fish by original title. The state had no right to interfere with fishing on the reservation.

The second point followed naturally. Since the Quinault owned the fish, selling them for shipment to New York was federal interstate commerce, far beyond state game laws.

A Washington court had just protected the commercial sale of steelhead and affirmed treaty rights. Even narrowly, this is not necessarily the history we understand of that era. Few now expect state courts to respect treaty rights in 1930. Standard histories tend to skip from the 1905 Winans case straight to the 1950s, where I will pick up in a second.

History is not a straight line. There are a lot of starts and stops, false dawns, in history. And, a lot happened during those missing decades we don’t normally talk about. Sitting in early 1930, no one knew how the next few decades were going to unfold, or if the 14 boxes of steelhead case would lead anywhere other than the bare facts of the case.

Sometimes, what seems like a major turning point ends up being a forgettable bump.

For example, in 1915, Olympia lawyer E.N. Steele set up what he thought would be a test case to settle tribal rights. He was even able to team up with federal prosecutors to use the prosecution of two tribal members for illegal hunting. Steele told his clients to plead guilty so he and the U.S. Attorney’s Office could appeal straight to federal court. 

It had been practice for local officials to arrest tribal hunters and fishermen, but for the courts to drop cases before prosecution. Enough effort to cause havoc for tribal members, but not enough that they would actually have to settle what the treaties meant.

But as the cases proceeded, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Becker, ruling that state game laws applied to tribal hunters off reservations. That ruined Steele’s strategy. His clients had been cited for hunting, so his legal test collapsed.

Steele dropped the cases. Local officials declared victory, and Steele walked away from treaty litigation for good.

Decades later, the Boldt decision proved Steele’s core arguments right. If his 1915 test case had succeeded, Pacific Northwest history might have changed sixty years earlier. History is never a straight line. We never know how we’re going to end up where we go.

Two years after the 1930 ruling, voters passed Initiative 62. It created the Washington Department of Game, separating it from the more commercial-focused Department of Fisheries. Game immediately banned taking, holding, or selling steelhead statewide.

It is worth looping back to point out that during this post-World War I era, angling groups also weaponized nativist sentiment against non-tribal commercial fishing. As xenophobia culminated in restrictive federal immigration laws, sportsmen’s organizations routinely targeted the Greek, Italian, Slavic, and Scandinavian immigrants who gillnetted and worked in canneries. Anglers framed netters not just as competitors for fish, but as un-American, greedy exploiters who used uncivilized techniques to strip public waters for private profit. On the other hand, rod-and-reel angling was romanticized as a noble, patriotic pastime rooted in traditional American sportsmanship.

Supporters pitched the campaign around conservation, but the result was a sport-angling monopoly on steelhead. By outlawing nets and trade, the state turned treaty-protected fishing and otherwise legal food harvesting into illegal poaching, setting up decades of conflict.

The state Supreme Court wavered on the point of state authority over tribal fishing for decades. In 1957, State v. Satiacum ended in a split vote, leaving state authority over treaty fishing in limbo.

Then, in the 1960s, the court reversed course and started driving hard against treaty rights. In 1963 and 1967, judges ruled that the state could enforce conservation rules on treaty fishermen off the reservation. They treated treaty rights as privileges subject to state regulation, ignoring supreme federal law.

History is not a straight line. If that court hadn’t pushed so hard against treaty rights, would tribes and federal authorities have fought back hard enough to force the Boldt decision?

Arrests and net seizures sparked the Fish Wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Treaty activists organized fish-ins and civil disobedience. The state court clashed directly with federal treaty law, forcing the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene.

That led to United States v. Washington. In 1974, Judge George Boldt ruled that tribes were co-managers entitled to half of the harvestable catch, which is well beyond where anyone thought a treaty fishing rights case would end up. By pushing hard, they nearly lost everything. When state judges tried to block compliance, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and affirmed that federal treaties overrule state law.

State overreach triggered federal intervention. The state court’s push to criminalize tribal fishing ultimately created the framework for modern tribal co-management.

If you want to see how far the state’s side of the argument went, look at Slade Gorton.

As attorney general, Gorton treated tribes as if they lacked sovereign power. He argued federal dominance left no room for tribal government, so he dismissed treaty rights outright.

That view drove his repeated efforts to overturn federal mandates and strip tribes of law enforcement authority on their own land.

In 1984, voters passed Initiative 456. It declared that natural resource management belonged to the state alone, claimed off-reservation treaty rights were void, and asked Congress to name steelhead a game fish.

1984 turned out to be the high water mark of the steelhead-as-gamefish world.

Five years later, scientists pulled at the thread from another direction and reclassified steelhead. They moved rainbow trout and steelhead out of the Atlantic trout genus Salmo and into Oncorhynchus, the Pacific salmon genus. The scientific name became Oncorhynchus mykiss.

For over a century, European taxonomists grouped steelhead with brown trout based on one trait. Steelhead can survive spawning and run multiple times, whereas other Pacific salmon spawn once and die.

Researchers Gerald Smith and Ralph Stearley changed that. Using early computers to analyze bone structures and body traits, they showed steelhead share a direct lineage with Pacific salmon.

DNA testing confirmed those findings. Rainbow trout and steelhead are closer relatives to pink and chum than to Atlantic salmon. The evidence was undeniable.

Taxonomy relies on objective genetics and physical traits. Yet this reclassification caused an uproar because it collided with old cultural assumptions.

Fly anglers hated the change. Traditional fly fishing prized trout for delicate tactics and catch-and-release ethics, while salmon meant commercial nets and food harvest. Calling the prized game fish a salmon felt like a step down to them.

Look at how we think about these fish. Pacific salmon return in massive, predictable runs, making them an ideal food source. Steelhead show up in smaller, scattered numbers. We placed them on a pedestal as a romantic, solitary sport fish.

When people discuss connecting with nature, they often dismiss commercial fishing. But we don’t think about the manner in which all of us can access the food the rivers provide.

We don’t say “commercial teaching” or “commercial carpentry.” We accept work as a normal way people earn a living. We rarely even say “commercial farming” either, since growing food is simply how we feed communities and accepting money for labor is a no-brainer.

Few people catch wild food for fun. Sport fishing is fine on its own, but prioritizing recreation over food production for whole communities pushes a false story about “game fish.” Fishing has always been something people have done to provide a means of support for themselves, their families, and their communities. There is dignity in labor, and fishing is labor and fish are food.

The fish in those fourteen wooden boxes were Oncorhynchus mykiss. They were always salmon. And they were always food. They were traded and harvested for generations before European settlement and currency-based economics. Steelhead were always part of a regional economic system.

Nobody in Aberdeen in 1929 called them mykiss. Back then, official records called them Salmo gairdneri. This set up decades of battles over words and what they mean.

The movement to turn steelhead into a protected game fish, literally the words we choose to describe an animal, created a false split between sport angling and harvesting fish to feed families. State agencies tried to dismiss treaty economies that relied on salmon for livelihood and food. Court decisions and genetic research eventually confirmed that tribal treaty rights are supreme federal law and that steelhead have always belonged to the Pacific salmon family.