Nez Perce (Nimiipuu)

01Summary

Salmon fishers, horse breeders and bison hunters whose homeland spread across present-day Idaho, Oregon and Washington. In 1805 and 1806 they fed and sheltered the hungry Lewis and Clark expedition. The Nez Perce stayed friendly to Americans through the trail years, until a gold rush and a treaty forced on them in 1863 led to the war of 1877.

02History

The Nez Perce call themselves Nimiipuu, 'the people.' In the time of Lewis and Clark they were one of the largest nations on the Columbia Plateau, with a homeland of about 17 million acres along the Snake, Clearwater and Salmon rivers. They fished for salmon, dug camas and other roots, raised large herds of horses, among them the spotted horses later called Appaloosas, and crossed the Bitterroot Mountains to hunt bison.

In the fall of 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition came out of the Bitterroots half-starved. The Nez Perce gave them dried fish and roots, kept their horses over the winter and helped them again on the way home in 1806. In 1836 they welcomed Henry and Eliza Spalding's mission at Lapwai. Through the trail years they traded horses and food to emigrants. In 1853 the emigrant Elizabeth Goltra wrote of Nez Perce people who 'came along with some potatoes and peas, which is a welcome vegetable to emigrants.'

At the Walla Walla Council of 1855 Nez Perce leaders, Lawyer among them, signed a treaty that kept most of their homeland as a reservation. Gold was found there in 1860, miners poured in, and in 1863 the United States pressed a new treaty that cut the reservation by about 90 percent. The bands whose lands were taken, including Old Joseph's Wallowa band, never signed it.

In 1877 the Army ordered these bands onto the smaller reservation. After young men killed settlers in revenge for earlier wrongs, war broke out. About 800 Nez Perce men, women and children fled some 1,170 miles through Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, hoping to reach Canada. They surrendered in the Bears Paw Mountains on October 5, 1877, about 40 miles from the border. Chief Joseph's surrender speech, as an Army officer wrote it down, ended: 'From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.'

03Notable leaders

• Old Chief Joseph (Tuekakas)
  Wallowa band leader, c. 1785-1871. An early Christian convert who backed the 1855 treaty, then refused the 1863 treaty and tore up his Bible.
• Chief Joseph (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt)
  Wallowa band leader, 1840-1904, the best-known voice of the 1877 war, who spent his last years in exile on the Colville Reservation.
• Lawyer (Hallalhotsoot)
  Nez Perce leader, a son of Twisted Hair, who signed the treaties of 1855 and 1863 and died in 1876.
• Looking Glass (Allalimya Takanin)
  Alpowai band leader and a war leader in 1877, killed in the Bears Paw battle.

04Today