They were told: the leaders will not be killed.

The people will be returned to Idaho.

The army wants to quit fighting.

Joseph decided to accept these terms.

He would end the fighting for those still with him.

White Bird did not.

He looked at what the United States Army had promised the nimíipuu before, and what those promises had produced, and he made a different calculation.

He refused to surrender.

And then he was gone.

This is the story of how a man who had been fighting a losing war for more than four months, who had watched the army burn camps and kill women and children and run down horses, who had crossed a thousand miles of mountain and plain, reached the edge of safety at forty miles and chose to keep going rather than trust the word of the soldiers who had been trying to kill his people all summer.

It is also, necessarily, the story of how they got there — all 1,170 miles of it — because you cannot understand White Bird’s decision at Bear Paw without understanding what the nimíipuu had been through to get there.

Who The nimíipuu Were Before 1877

The people who call themselves nimíipuu — a name that means “the people” in their language — had lived in the plateau country of what is now northeastern Oregon, northern Idaho, and southeastern Washington for generations beyond counting.

They were not a single nation in the European political sense.