The Flight of the Nez Perce: Eleven Hundred Miles Toward Canada

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, General Oliver Howard was given simple orders: move the Nez Perce bands off their traditional lands and onto the Lapwai reservation in Idaho, by force if necessary. What followed was one of the most extraordinary military retreats in American history, and it lasted three months.

The people the Army called the Nez Perce called themselves Niimíipuu, which means the real people. Five bands, roughly seven hundred and fifty people, perhaps two hundred and fifty of them warriors and the rest women, children, and elders, left their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon in the late spring of eighteen seventy-seven. They were pursued by forces that eventually numbered over two thousand soldiers. Over the next nearly four months they would fight a series of engagements, including four major battles, and cover one thousand one hundred and seventy miles of the most rugged terrain in North America.

The route is almost impossible to trace on a modern map without understanding what it cost. They crossed Hells Canyon first, swimming horses and children across the Snake River. They moved through the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana while the Army assumed they would not. They survived the predawn massacre at the Big Hole River in early August, losing perhaps ninety of their number, the majority of them women and children. They crossed Yellowstone while tourists fled before them. They fought the Army to a standstill at Canyon Creek. They came within forty miles of the Canadian border and the sanctuary of Sitting Bull's camp before Colonel Nelson Miles surrounded them at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana.

Five war leaders guided the flight. Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to Americans as Chief Joseph, was the principal diplomatic voice of the Wallowa Band. Looking Glass commanded in battle until he was killed at Bear Paw. White Bird led his people through the final siege and escaped north to Canada with around two hundred and thirty of the Niimíipuu. Toohoolhoolzote, the Dreamer prophet, died at Bear Paw. Ollokot, Joseph's brother and the primary battle chief, died there too.

The people who surrendered at Bear Paw on October fifth, eighteen seventy-seven, were not taken to their Idaho homeland. They were sent first to Kansas, then to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Many died there. Some were eventually returned to the Pacific Northwest, but not to Wallowa Valley. The Wallowa Band's descendants have never recovered their ancestral homeland, and they continue to seek its restoration today.