130 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
For several years, Gorton maintained that Congress should buy back
the Indians’ rights to off-reservation salmon through condemnation pro-
ceedings, much like the government acquires land for a new freeway.
After achieving condemnation for public necessity, a court could deter-
mine the dollar value of the treaty rights and send the bill to Congress,
the attorney general told the 1976 Pierce County Republican Convention.
“Redress is the duty of all the people in this country, not just a few fisher-
men in a handful of Western states.”^ Two years earlier, they had practi-
cally expelled him from the party for urging Nixon to resign. This speech
met with rousing applause.^30
Ramona Bennett, the leader of the Puyallup Tribe, was outraged.
“Rights aren’t for sale,” she said. “When you sell your rights, you have
sold yourself, and the Indians are not for sale. Fishing is our identity. It’s
our future, our sense of history. Indian children can’t grow up to be white
people. If they can’t find an Indian future for themselves, they’re dead.
Taking our fishing rights would be genocide.... Would Gorton sell his
children, or his law degree or his citizenship?”^31
Nor was Governor Evans impressed by the idea. Purchasing the Indi-
ans’ fishing rights would be “very, very expensive, and very, very diffi-
cult,” he said. Evans advocated expanding propagation programs to pro-
vide enough salmon for commercial fishermen, anglers and the tribes.
That was a lot easier said than done, he acknowledged, especially given
international pressures on the resource.^32
Justice Johnson says it was no secret that Evans and Gorton disagreed
over Indian fishing issues, but it was always philosophical, not personal.
“Slade had a longstanding close relationship with the governor. Gover-
nors do not have authority over the AG; that’s true, but they can (exert
influence).” Johnson’s predecessor as chief of the attorney general’s Game
and Fisheries division, Larry Coniff, was reassigned in 1975 for criticizing
the Fisheries director, Thor Tollefson, at a Fisheries Department Christ-
mas Party.^33 Tollefson shared Evans’ view that the resource should be di-
vided equally among the sports, commercial and Indian fishermen. An
outspoken ideologue, Coniff was a holdover from O’Connell’s days as at-
torney general. His indiscretion gave Gorton an opportunity to install
Johnson. It certainly wasn’t a sop to Evans. The tribes would come to view
Johnson as a greater threat than Coniff because he was so shrewd.
Gorton always “had my back,” Johnson says. When the bumptious
Dixy Lee Ray became governor in 1977 Johnson says she tried to get him
fired more than once—the first time over a case that stemmed from a
major salmon kill on the Columbia. The Washington Public Power Sup-