The Nimiipuu, People of the Land

They called themselves Nimiipuu, which means simply "the people." The name Nez Perce came from French fur traders, supposedly because some members wore decorative shells through pierced noses, though the tribe never practiced nose piercing. Whatever the name, the Nimiipuu had lived in the plateaus and river valleys of what is now north-central Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington for at least eleven thousand years.

Their world was organized around the Clearwater and Salmon River drainages. They fished for salmon at the falls, dug camas root in the prairies east of present-day Lewiston, hunted elk and deer in the mountains, and crossed the Bitterroots every summer to hunt bison on the plains of Montana. The horse arrived among the Nimiipuu around seventeen hundred, and within a generation they had become renowned horse breeders. The Appaloosa horse, with its distinctive spotted coat, was developed and prized by Nimiipuu breeders across the Palouse country.

When Lewis and Clark arrived exhausted and starving at the Weippe Prairie in September of eighteen oh five, it was Nimiipuu hospitality that saved the expedition. A Nimiipuu woman named Watkuweis, who had once been taken captive and treated kindly by white traders, counseled her people not to harm these strangers. The Corps was fed, their horses were cared for, and they were guided down the Clearwater to the Columbia.

That kindness was not forgotten by the Nimiipuu. It was also, ultimately, not repaid. The treaty of eighteen fifty-five recognized a large homeland. By eighteen sixty-three, after gold was discovered on Nimiipuu land, a new treaty reduced that homeland by more than ninety percent. The people who had saved an American expedition would soon be at war with the nation it represented.