The journals of Lewis and Clark recorded positive impressions of the people they called Chopunnish or Nez Perce.

The fur trade and the missionary period that followed brought different kinds of contact: Protestant missionaries in the 1830s, Catholic missionaries in the 1840s, the gradual arrival of settlers moving along the Oregon Trail.

The nimíipuu navigated these contacts with the same sophistication they had always brought to dealing with outsiders — trading when trading was beneficial, maintaining their own political coherence, and attempting to understand what these newcomers wanted and what could be negotiated.

Governor Stevens’s 1855 treaty was presented to the assembled chiefs as a permanent agreement — the federal government’s way of defining the nimíipuu territory in American law and providing some protection against the settler pressure that was already visible on the horizon.