McWhorter decades later, contains references to specific individuals — including young people who participated in various engagements as warriors.

His account, and the accounts collected from other survivors, provide some of the most detailed nimíipuu-perspective documentation of the 1877 events.

For the children who survived and were eventually allowed to return to the Northwest, the 1877 flight was the defining experience of their childhood.

It shaped their understanding of who the nimíipuu were, what had been done to them, and what the relationship between their people and the United States government actually was.

For some of those children’s children — people alive in the early twentieth century when scholars and writers began seriously documenting the 1877 events — the flight was recent family history, not distant legend.