The grass rolls away toward whatever it looked like in the dark of October 4 to 5, 1877, when people began moving through it in the cold, heading for a line on a map that might mean something.

Some of them made it.

White Bird made it.

He never came back.

Remembering The Whole Story

The story of the 1877 Flight of the nimíipuu belongs to multiple people and multiple communities: to the Nez Perce Tribe and the people descended from those who survived, to the descendants of the settlers who died in the violence that started the war, to the descendants of the soldiers, to the historians and tribal cultural managers and NPS staff who preserve and interpret the sites, to the people who drive up to Chinook and walk out to the battlefield and try to understand what happened there.

The story does not belong to a simplified narrative in which the nimíipuu were noble victims and the army was uniformly villainous, or in which the army was enforcing legitimate law and the nimíipuu were simply criminals.