Eight Hundred People Running for Canada

They entered the park around August twentieth, eighteen seventy-seven. Approximately eight hundred people: men, women, children, elders, moving with horses and what remained of their possessions. They had been running for two months. They would run for two more.

The Nez Perce War had begun in Idaho that June, when several bands refused confinement to a reduced reservation, a fraction of the territory guaranteed to them by treaty. A series of violent confrontations with settlers followed. The United States Army mobilized. Rather than surrender, the bands under the leadership of Chief Joseph, Looking Glass, and others chose to flee north toward Canada, where Sitting Bull's people had found refuge.

They knew Yellowstone. The Nez Perce had traveled through this country for generations, trading, hunting, following routes that predated any American map. What the Army expected to be unfamiliar terrain was, for the Nez Perce, home ground.

Inside the park, the flight turned violent. A group of tourists from Montana encountered the Nez Perce near what is now called Nez Perce Creek. Two tourists were killed. Others were wounded. A man named George Cowan was shot and left for dead and survived. A civilian named Frank Carpenter was taken as a guide. The Army pursued the Nez Perce through the Lamar Valley, over the Absaroka Range, and into Montana, never catching them inside the park.

The chase continued north for six weeks. By October, the exhausted group had crossed most of Montana. They were forty miles from the Canadian border when Colonel Nelson Miles surrounded them at a place called Bear's Paw. It was October fifth, eighteen seventy-seven. They had traveled approximately eleven hundred seventy miles.

Chief Joseph's surrender speech has been quoted ever since. 'From where the sun now stands,' he said, 'I will fight no more forever.' He was surrendering for the women, the children, the wounded, for the people who had nothing left to give. He was told his people would be returned to Idaho. They were not. Of the roughly seven hundred fifty people who began the flight, roughly one hundred fifty were eventually settled at the Colville Reservation in Washington State. Most never saw the Wallowa Valley again.

The creek that runs through the middle of Yellowstone National Park still carries the name Nez Perce Creek. It marks the route of a people who knew this landscape long before the park existed, and who passed through it one last time.