Wallowa-Whitman: The Nez Perce Homeland at the Heart of the Forest

The Wallowa Mountains rise from the northeastern corner of Oregon in a way that seems improbable, an alpine range nearly ten thousand feet high surrounded by high desert. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest covers about two point two million acres of the Wallowas, the Blue Mountains, and the canyon country that descends to Hells Canyon on the Idaho border. In the middle of it, Wallowa Lake lies at the foot of the mountains, a glacially carved lake so perfect in its geometry that it looks designed.

The Wallowa Valley was the homeland of the Wal-lam-wat-kain, the Wallowa Band of Nez Perce. They had lived in this valley for thousands of years when the treaty of eighteen sixty-three, signed by Nez Perce leaders from other bands, ceded the Wallowa Valley without the Wallowa Band's consent or participation. The federal government told the Wallowa Band to move to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho. Chief Joseph's father, also named Joseph, known as Old Joseph or Tuekakas, had accepted Christianity and a treaty in eighteen fifty-five that he believed protected his people's territory. He died in eighteen seventy-one, having watched that protection dissolve. His son, the younger Joseph, known to the Nez Perce as Hinmatóowyalahtq'it, was left with his father's dying instructions: never sell the land.

In eighteen seventy-seven, federal troops arrived to enforce removal. Joseph and the Wallowa Band fled, along with other nonconsenting Nez Perce bands. They traveled one thousand one hundred seventy miles through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana before being surrounded forty miles short of the Canadian border at the Bear Paw Battlefield. The surrender speech Joseph gave on October fifth, eighteen seventy-seven, is one of the most quoted documents in American history.

The Wallowa Valley was settled by non-Native farmers and ranchers after the removal. In recent decades, the Nez Perce Tribe has worked to reestablish a presence in their homeland, including a cultural center in Wallowa and negotiations over land access. Wallowa Lake State Park, at the foot of the mountains, sits where the people who were removed came from.