The Big Hole Massacre: The Night the Flight Nearly Ended

After crossing Hells Canyon and moving through the Bitterroot Valley, the Niimíipuu believed they had reached safety. They had passed through the Bitterroot without conflict, and the local settlers and Salish people had let them pass. They made camp on the Big Hole River in southwestern Montana, in a place they called Iskumtselalik Pah, which means the place of the ground squirrels. They needed rest. The horses needed grass. The children were exhausted. They set up their lodges and slept.

Before dawn on August ninth, eighteen seventy-seven, Colonel John Gibbon led roughly two hundred soldiers and civilian volunteers to the edge of the Nez Perce camp. They opened fire on the sleeping village. Approximately eighty to ninety Niimíipuu died in the initial assault and the fighting that followed, the majority of them women, children, and elders. Among the dead was the daughter of Looking Glass. Women tried to shield children in the river as soldiers fired into the water.

The warriors, though surprised and initially overwhelmed, regrouped with remarkable speed. They turned, surrounded the soldiers, and pinned Gibbon's force in a hillside position for the better part of a day. The soldiers' mountain howitzer was captured. Gibbon himself was wounded. By nightfall the Niimíipuu had broken through and were moving south toward Yellowstone, carrying their dead and their wounded with them.

The Big Hole National Battlefield is now a National Park Service site. It is one of the few battlefields in the country where the interpretive materials are jointly developed with the tribal nation whose people were killed there. The Nez Perce Tribe calls it the most sacred site on the entire flight corridor. Each year tribal members return to the river to remember the dead.

In the language of the Niimíipuu, the place where they were attacked while sleeping is still called Iskumtselalik Pah. The name was there before the soldiers came and it outlasted them.