White Bird Canyon: The Shot That Started a War
Idaho
On the morning of June seventeenth, eighteen seventy-seven, six Nez Perce warriors rode toward the approaching U.S. cavalry column carrying a white flag. They had been sent by their chiefs with clear instructions: do not fire unless fired upon. They were there to parley.
A civilian volunteer named Arthur Chapman fired on them anyway. That shot, its motive never fully explained, ignited the Battle of White Bird Canyon, the opening engagement of the Nez Perce War. By the time the fighting ended a few hours later, thirty-four American soldiers lay dead. The Nez Perce lost none.
Captain David Perry had ridden through the night from Fort Lapwai with ninety-nine soldiers and about a dozen civilian volunteers, responding to reports of violence in the Salmon River country. He expected to find a disorganized group of frightened Indians. What he found instead was a disciplined force of fifty to seventy Nez Perce warriors who knew the canyon terrain intimately and had prepared their ground.
When the truce party was fired on and the battle began, Perry's command almost immediately lost its cohesion. Warriors used the ridgelines and draws of the canyon to outflank the column's left. The bugler, key to relaying orders in the noise of battle, was shot early. Without coordinated commands, the soldiers became confused. A rout followed.
Perry's survivors fled north toward Grangeville. The Nez Perce recovered dozens of rifles and pistols from the battlefield, some accounts counting more than sixty carbines, weapons they would use throughout the long flight that followed.
White Bird Canyon set the tone for the entire war that followed. The Nez Perce had demonstrated that they could defeat a professional cavalry force in open engagement. The army, shaken and embarrassed, would spend the next four months in pursuit, and would not catch them until they were just forty miles from Canada.
The battlefield today is part of Nez Perce National Historical Park. The canyon looks much as it did that June morning. The flag of truce is the detail that history does not let rest.
