Fort Fizzle and the Nez Perce

You are near the spot where one of the more embarrassing moments in United States Army history took place, and where something remarkable happened: a band of roughly seven hundred fifty people, including women, elders, and children, simply walked around a military barricade and continued on their way.

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven the Nez Perce War had broken out in Idaho after a series of broken treaties forced several non-treaty bands from their ancestral homeland in the Wallowa Valley. After fighting at the Battle of the Clearwater in July, Chief Joseph and a coalition of Nez Perce leaders decided to flee east across the Lolo Trail into Montana, hoping to reach Crow territory or eventually Canada. They traveled with roughly two hundred fifty warriors and more than five hundred women, children and elders, along with more than two thousand horses.

Captain Charles Rawn at Fort Missoula had only thirty-five soldiers. He threw up a log barricade across the Lolo Canyon mouth, just downstream from where you are now, hoping to halt the Nez Perce until General Oliver Howard could arrive with reinforcements. Local settlers, terrified of attack, joined the improvised fortification.

But the Nez Perce had no intention of fighting here. They simply scouted the terrain, found a route around the barricade through the steep timber above the canyon, and during the night of July twenty-eighth, eighteen seventy-seven, the entire band bypassed the fort entirely and descended into the Bitterroot Valley. When dawn came, Rawn's men discovered they were blocking an empty canyon. The settlers, relieved that there would be no fight, quietly went home. Newspapers mocked the fortification immediately as Fort Fizzle, a name that stuck.

The Nez Perce continued their extraordinary flight for another two months and many hundreds of miles before being stopped just forty miles short of the Canadian border at the Battle of Bear Paw.