The thirty-day order was the endpoint of a longer process of claiming land that the nimíipuu had not ceded.

White Bird’s Salmon River country was a different landscape — the steep canyon country along the Salmon River and its tributaries — but it faced the same pressure: settlers moving in, livestock grazing on nimíipuu land, demands that the people remove themselves from the country they had always occupied.

When White Bird refused to sign the 1863 treaty, he was not refusing an abstract political document.

He was refusing to give up the specific landscape where his band had lived, the rivers where they fished, the mountains where they hunted, the camas prairies where they gathered the root that was one of the foundations of their diet.