Big Hole Battlefield: The Morning the Nez Perce Woke to Cannon Fire

In the early morning hours of August ninth of eighteen seventy-seven, approximately two hundred soldiers under Colonel John Gibbon attacked a sleeping encampment of Nez Perce in the Big Hole Valley of southwestern Montana. The Nez Perce band, led by chiefs including Looking Glass and White Bird, had been traveling for more than a month after leaving their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, trying to reach Canada after the failure of negotiations over their forced removal.

The attack came before dawn. The soldiers moved through the willows along the Big Hole River and opened fire on the camp as the first light came up. Over the day and a half of fighting that followed, an estimated sixty to ninety Nez Perce were killed, many of them women, children, and elderly who had been in their tipis when the attack began. Gibbon's force then established a defensive position, having taken significant casualties as well. Nez Perce warriors pinned the soldiers down while the main band escaped south.

The battle was a tactical victory for the Nez Perce, who pinned Gibbon's force down and escaped with most of their horses, though at devastating cost. It did not end the campaign. The Nez Perce continued south, through what is now Yellowstone National Park, then north through Wyoming and into Montana again, eventually being surrounded at the Bear's Paw Mountains roughly forty miles from the Canadian border, where Chief Joseph delivered his surrender speech in October of the same year.

Big Hole National Battlefield is administered by the National Park Service on land adjacent to the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The site is managed in consultation with the Nez Perce Tribe, whose members regard it as a place of mourning.