where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

spirit of the father 27
build Camp Lewis on roughly seventy thousand acres. A. V. Fawcett,
then mayor of Tacoma, hyperbolically predicted, “Tacoma, the City
of Destiny, is now ready to establish that destiny as a world power.”
Camp Lewis included private lands and two-thirds of the Nisqually
Indian Reservation east of the river. It included the home of Willie
Frank.
Because reservation land is held in trust with the federal government,
it requires congressional approval to be condemned. Nevertheless,
plans for nearly eight hundred buildings and sixty thousand
men marched forward in the spirit of war. Non-Indians and Indians
alike were uprooted from their homes. The whites came to see Willie
and several dozen families who lived on allotments. They showed up
out of nowhere one night on his family’s 205 acres at Muck Creek,
and then unloaded Indians into a shanty town: “Indian, he had to
move out. . . . They brought the Army trucks from Fort Lewis and
unloaded these old people and hauled them over on this side of the
river, Thurston County side; unloaded them under the great big fir
trees; got long limbs to stick out, and unloaded these old people
under that tree.”
The fast-paced condemnation of the Nisqually Reservation stirred
up interest in Congress. Although a 1920 report urged the government
to return acreage to the Nisqually Tribe, Indians never reclaimed their
homeland. In 1921, the Committee on Indian Affairs revealed that
Pierce County had begun condemnation proceedings without the
express knowledge of the Department of the Interior: “The records
show that, unknown to the department, proceedings were instituted
early in 1918 by the authorities of Pierce County, Wash., to condemn
approximately 3,300 acres of allotted Indian land on the Nisqually
Reservation for the purpose of turning the same over to the U.S. government
for the use of the War Department in enlarging its activities
at Camp Lewis.”
Further, the committee concluded, “The ambition of Tacoma to
acquire one of the Army posts, and the war necessity, caused Pierce
County, Washington, in April, 1918 to condemn the best two-thirds