The Nez Perce War, Flight of Eighteen Seventy-Seven

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, roughly seven hundred and fifty Nimiipuu men, women, children, and elders crossed into Idaho's Bitterroot Valley as refugees. They had not started the war. The fighting had begun in June when a group of young Nimiipuu men, enraged at years of dispossession, killed a handful of settlers in the Salmon River country. The army responded. What followed was one of the most remarkable military retreats in American history, and one of its most tragic endings.

For four months, a fighting force of roughly two hundred and fifty Nimiipuu warriors, led by a council that included the leaders Toohoolhoolzote, Looking Glass, White Bird, and a man the settlers called Chief Joseph, kept three separate U.S. Army columns at bay across seventeen hundred miles of rugged terrain. They crossed the Bitterroot Mountains, fought through Montana, and drove toward Canada and the sanctuary offered by Sitting Bull.

The army's General Oliver Howard, pursuing from the west, kept being outpaced and outmaneuvered. In the Clearwater Battle of July and in the Big Hole ambush in Montana, the Nimiipuu suffered severe losses, including among women, children, and elders. They kept moving.

They stopped, exhausted, just forty miles from the Canadian border in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana in late September. General Nelson Miles arrived with fresh troops before the Nimiipuu could rest. After five days of siege, in October of eighteen seventy-seven, the council agreed to surrender. Looking Glass was killed by a sniper's bullet during the final hours.

The speech attributed to Joseph at the surrender, ending with the words "I will fight no more forever," became one of the most quoted statements of the era. Historians note the words may have been translated and shaped by an army officer. What is not in question is what happened afterward: the Nimiipuu were sent not to their Idaho homeland but to Kansas, then Oklahoma, where dozens died of malaria. Joseph spent the rest of his life petitioning unsuccessfully to return to the Wallowa Valley. He died in Washington State in nineteen oh four.