In the rivers of Washington State, treaty fishing became the crime of the century's midpoint. Nisqually fisherman Billy Frank Jr. was first arrested at fourteen, in 1945, and more than fifty times thereafter for exercising rights his nation had reserved in the Treaty of Medicine Creek; through the 1960s the "fish-ins" at Frank's Landing — joined by Puyallup leaders like Ramona Bennett and celebrities like Marlon Brando and Dick Gregory, who served time in Thurston County jail — met state game wardens' clubs, boats rammed, nets confiscated, families beaten on the riverbank.

The campaign of deliberate arrest, modeled consciously on the southern sit-ins, produced its vindication in 1974: United States v. Washington, the Boldt decision, affirmed the tribes' right to half the salmon harvest and made the fish-in defendants the authors of modern treaty law.