All of them — the ones who surrendered and the ones who escaped, the ones who survived and the ones who didn’t — were people trying to hold onto their lives and their identity and their connection to their country in the face of a force that was determined to eliminate those things in the name of expansion and settlement and what the nineteenth century called progress.

The Route Today

If you drive north from Billings, Montana, on U.S.

Highway 191 toward the town of Chinook, you will cross the kind of country that the nimíipuu traveled in September and October 1877.

The grass is still short and brown in autumn.

The sky is enormous.

The Bear Paw Mountains are visible to the southwest, rolling hills that look less dramatic than mountains because the plains approach them from the east at nearly the same elevation.

The Bear Paw Battlefield is about sixteen miles south of Chinook.