Hells Canyon and the Nez Perce Exile: The Deepest Gorge in North America

Hells Canyon, on the Idaho-Oregon border where the Snake River has cut through basalt and granite for millions of years, is the deepest river gorge in North America. At its deepest point, measured from the summit of He Devil Peak in the Seven Devils Mountains to the river below, the canyon drops approximately eight thousand and forty feet, nearly two thousand feet deeper than the Grand Canyon's deepest point.

The Nez Perce homeland centered on the Wallowa Valley in Oregon and the canyons and tributary rivers of the Snake drainage, including Hells Canyon itself. When the government's eighteen sixty-three treaty reduced the Nez Perce reservation by approximately ninety percent, the bands whose territory fell in the ceded zone, including Chief Joseph's Wallowa band, refused to recognize the treaty. The argument lasted for years, through negotiations, through the arrival of settlers on the lands they still claimed, through the growing pressure of the reservation system.

In eighteen seventy-seven, the Army ordered the non-treaty Nez Perce onto the reservation. Chief Joseph's band was crossing Hells Canyon on their way to comply, when younger members of the band killed several settlers in retaliation for previous killings of Nez Perce. The Army's response was immediate: this became the opening action of the Nez Perce War of eighteen seventy-seven, one of the longest running military campaigns against an Indigenous band in the post-Civil War era.

The Payette National Forest abuts Hells Canyon on the east. The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest manages the Idaho side of the canyon itself.