Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

The Nisqually comes down off the glaciers of Mount Rainier and spreads into a delta at the south end of Puget Sound, one of the least developed river mouths left on the Sound. Around the turn of the twentieth century a farmer named Alson Brown diked the salt marsh to make pasture, and for a hundred years the tide stayed out. In November 2009 the refuge took the dikes down, and salt water came back over 762 acres. The boardwalk that opened in 2011 runs about a mile out across the restored estuary toward open water, over channels the salmon use again to feed and grow before they go out to sea.

Billy Frank Jr. grew up a few miles upriver at Frank's Landing, a six-acre piece of Nisqually land on the river. He was first arrested for fishing there in 1945, at fourteen. Through the fish-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s, when Nisqually, Puyallup and other treaty fishermen set their nets in defiance of state game wardens, he was arrested more than fifty times, and the confrontations on the riverbank were sometimes violent. The question went to federal court, and in February 1974 Judge George Boldt ruled that the treaties of the 1850s guaranteed the tribes half the harvestable salmon.

He spent the rest of his life on salmon and their rivers, and he was among those who pushed for the dikes here to come out. He died in 2014. In December 2015 Congress renamed the refuge for him and designated the treaty ground inside it Medicine Creek Treaty National Memorial.