The Nez Perce Flight: One Thousand One Hundred Seventy Miles

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, nearly seven hundred and fifty Nez Perce men, women, children, and elders, with roughly two thousand horses, left their homelands in northeastern Oregon and began one of the most extraordinary retreats in the history of the American West. They were trying to reach Canada. They traveled one thousand one hundred seventy miles through four states, crossing the Bitterroot Mountains and Yellowstone before finally surrendering just forty miles short of the border. That route is now the Nez Perce National Historic Trail.

The crisis had been building for years. In eighteen sixty-three, the federal government renegotiated the Nez Perce reservation treaty in ways that many bands refused to recognize, slashing the reservation by ninety percent and ordering bands that had never signed to relocate. The non-treaty bands, including the Wallowa Band under Chief Joseph, resisted for more than a decade through legal and diplomatic means. But in eighteen seventy-seven, the army set a deadline: move or be forcibly removed. Tensions broke into violence before the deadline passed, and the flight began.

What followed was a military campaign unlike any the army had encountered. The Nez Perce outmaneuvered, outfought, and repeatedly slipped away from pursuing columns. They were not simply fleeing. They were protecting families, elders, and horse herds while fighting skilled rear-guard actions. Chief Joseph himself was primarily a civil leader and camp organizer, the war leaders were chiefs like Looking Glass, White Bird, and Lean Elk. The Nez Perce defeated army units at White Bird Canyon, Cottonwood Creek, and the Big Hole.

After four months and more than a dozen engagements, Colonel Nelson Miles intercepted them at Bear Paw, Montana, in early October, just short of Canada. After five days of siege, Joseph delivered the surrender address now remembered for its last line: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

Congress designated the National Historic Trail in nineteen eighty-six, tracing the route across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. The related Nez Perce National Historical Park includes thirty-eight sites across Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. You are traveling through its Idaho heart right now, the Clearwater country where the flight began in earnest.