Forty Miles<\/p>\n
October 5, 1877.<\/p>\n
The Bear Paw Mountains of northern Montana.<\/p>\n
The Canadian border was roughly forty miles away.<\/p>\n
For five days, the nim\u00edipuu \u2014 the Nez Perce people \u2014 had been pinned in rifle pits and hastily dug ravines at the place they called C’aynnim Alikinwaaspa, the Place of the Manure Fire.<\/p>\n
Colonel Nelson Miles had arrived with approximately 450 soldiers after a rapid march through the cold autumn plains, catching the nim\u00edipuu almost entirely by surprise.<\/p>\n
The first assault had cost both sides heavily.<\/p>\n
The siege that followed was conducted in bitter cold, with artillery directed at the area where families had taken shelter.<\/p>\n
They had traveled more than 1,170 miles to reach this place.<\/p>\n
The group that began the flight included approximately 800 people: warriors, elders, women, children, horses, and the entire material world of five non-treaty bands.<\/p>\n
They had crossed Idaho and Montana through mountain passes that the army thought were impassable.<\/p>\n
They had fought at White Bird Canyon, at the Clearwater, at the Big Hole, at Camas Meadows.<\/p>\n
They had moved through Yellowstone country and across the open plains of central Montana.<\/p>\n
They had been pursued the whole way by General Oliver Otis Howard’s column, and now Miles had cut them off from the north.<\/p>\n
Forty miles.<\/p>\n
Two days of travel in good conditions.<\/p>\n
For people who were exhausted, hungry, without enough horses, watching soldiers with artillery control the ridgelines above their camp \u2014 forty miles might as well have been four hundred.<\/p>\n
On the morning of October 5, the two remaining hereditary leaders in the camp \u2014 Joseph and White Bird \u2014 met with two treaty Nez Perce men who had come in under Howard’s protection to try to end the fighting.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were told: the leaders will not be killed.<\/p>\n
The people will be returned to Idaho.<\/p>\n
The army wants to quit fighting.<\/p>\n
Joseph decided to accept these terms.<\/p>\n
He would end the fighting for those still with him.<\/p>\n
White Bird did not.<\/p>\n
He looked at what the United States Army had promised the nim\u00edipuu before, and what those promises had produced, and he made a different calculation.<\/p>\n
He refused to surrender.<\/p>\n
And then he was gone.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It is also, necessarily, the story of how they got there \u2014 all 1,170 miles of it \u2014 because you cannot understand White Bird’s decision at Bear Paw without understanding what the nim\u00edipuu had been through to get there.<\/p>\n
Who The nim\u00edipuu Were Before 1877<\/p>\n
The people who call themselves nim\u00edipuu \u2014 a name that means “the people” in their language \u2014 had lived in the plateau country of what is now northeastern Oregon, northern Idaho, and southeastern Washington for generations beyond counting.<\/p>\n
They were not a single nation in the European political sense.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were a collection of bands, each with its own leadership, its own territory, its own patterns of life.<\/p>\n
The bands were connected by language, by kinship, by shared traditions, by the seasonal rounds that brought groups together at camas root prairies and salmon runs and other places where food was abundant.<\/p>\n
They were expert horsemen \u2014 they had been breeding the Appaloosa horse, distinguished by its spotted coat, for generations \u2014 and skilled hunters and fishers whose territory included some of the most productive salmon rivers in North America.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu had relationships with European and American traders and explorers going back to Lewis and Clark, who passed through their country in 1805.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those early relationships were generally positive, and the nim\u00edipuu maintained them carefully through the first half of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
For decades, they navigated an expanding American presence with diplomacy and restraint.<\/p>\n
The treaty of 1855, negotiated by Governor Isaac Stevens of Washington Territory, recognized a large nim\u00edipuu territory and attempted to define the boundaries within which the people and the United States would coexist.<\/p>\n
Many nim\u00edipuu leaders signed it, including those from the bands in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon and along the Salmon River and its tributaries.<\/p>\n
The reservation it established was large \u2014 millions of acres \u2014 and included most of the traditional homeland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then gold was discovered.<\/p>\n
In 1860, prospectors found gold in the Clearwater country, within the 1855 reservation boundaries.<\/p>\n
What followed was, in the pattern so familiar from American history, a wave of mining activity that the treaty’s boundaries could not contain and that the U.S. government could not or would not enforce against.<\/p>\n
Settlers and miners moved onto nim\u00edipuu land.<\/p>\n
Pressure built to renegotiate the reservation boundaries and shrink them to exclude the most desirable land.<\/p>\n
In 1863, the U.S. government negotiated what the nim\u00edipuu who refused to sign it called the “steal treaty” \u2014 a new agreement that reduced the reservation by roughly ninety percent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Some Nez Perce leaders signed it, primarily those whose traditional territories fell within the reduced reservation’s new boundaries.<\/p>\n
They had practical reasons for doing so: their homes were secure under the new arrangement, and they calculated that accommodation was better than confrontation.<\/p>\n
The leaders of the bands whose traditional territories fell outside the new boundaries \u2014 including the Wallowa Valley, the Salmon River country, the Imnaha drainage \u2014 refused.<\/p>\n
They had not agreed to the 1863 reservation.<\/p>\n
They had not ceded their lands.<\/p>\n
They did not regard the treaty as binding on them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They continued to live where they had always lived.<\/p>\n
These were the non-treaty bands.<\/p>\n
And among their leaders were the men whose decisions in 1877 would set off the flight.<\/p>\n
The Non-Treaty Leaders<\/p>\n
White Bird was the name given by Americans to the leader of the Lamtama band of the nim\u00edipuu, who inhabited the Salmon River country of central Idaho.<\/p>\n
His nim\u00edipuu name was Peopeo Hihhih \u2014 White Goose, in some translations, or simply White Bird.<\/p>\n
He was elderly by 1877 \u2014 estimates place his age at somewhere between sixty and seventy, though precise records of his birth date do not exist.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had lived through the gold rush, the 1863 treaty dispute, and the steady expansion of settler presence into the country his people had always occupied.<\/p>\n
He was not a man who sought war.<\/p>\n
Contemporary accounts describe him as initially opposed to conflict and committed to finding a peaceful resolution to the crisis of 1877.<\/p>\n
But he was also a man who had spent a long life watching what American promises meant in practice, and he had reached conclusions about the reliability of those promises that would shape his decision at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
The leader of the Wallowa band, and the figure who would become most famous in American popular memory, was Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known to Americans as Joseph or Young Joseph.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was the son of Tuek\u00e1kas, or Old Joseph, who had been among those who refused the 1863 treaty and had instructed his son never to sell or surrender the Wallowa Valley.<\/p>\n
Other important leaders included:<\/p>\n
Ollokot, Joseph’s younger brother and the Wallowa band’s primary warrior leader.<\/p>\n
He was widely respected as a fighter and a man of considerable personal courage.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass, who led the Alpowai band from the Clearwater River drainage.<\/p>\n
He had initially sought to stay out of the 1877 conflict entirely, and the army’s unprovoked attack on his peaceful camp in July accelerated the crisis and forced his band into the flight.<\/p>\n
Toohoolhoolzote, the leader of the Pikunan band and a man known for his fierce resistance to the relocation order.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had famously confronted General Howard in council in May 1877, and Howard had placed him briefly under arrest to make a point about who had authority in the situation.<\/p>\n
Yellow Wolf, a warrior of the Wallowa band whose memoirs, recorded decades later, provide one of the most detailed first-person accounts of the 1877 flight from an nim\u00edipuu perspective.<\/p>\n
These were not interchangeable figures.<\/p>\n
They had different band affiliations, different territories, different temperaments, and different ideas about what the nim\u00edipuu should do at each stage of the crisis.<\/p>\n
The 1877 flight was not led by a single commander; it was guided by a council that debated options and sometimes disagreed sharply about the right course of action.<\/p>\n
Understanding this is essential to understanding what happened at Bear Paw, where Joseph and White Bird reached different conclusions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
General Howard And The Thirty-Day Deadline<\/p>\n
In May 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard called the non-treaty leaders together at Fort Lapwai, the military post in Idaho Territory, to deliver an ultimatum.<\/p>\n
The non-treaty bands had been under pressure to move to the Lapwai Reservation for years, but Howard was determined to end what he regarded as an illegal occupation of land outside the reservation boundaries.<\/p>\n
He gave the non-treaty leaders thirty days to gather their people, their horses, and their livestock and move to the reservation.<\/p>\n
Thirty days, in May, to move entire communities \u2014 including all their horses and cattle \u2014 across rivers running high with spring snowmelt.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Many of the leaders felt it was impossible.<\/p>\n
The crossing of the Snake River alone, with herds of horses and cattle, with families and elderly people and children, would be enormously difficult and dangerous.<\/p>\n
Toohoolhoolzote argued forcefully that the land could not be sold, that the earth was their mother and could not be given away by treaty, and that Howard had no authority to issue such an order.<\/p>\n
Howard had Toohoolhoolzote arrested and held for several days to demonstrate that he did have authority, or at least that he had soldiers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The leaders decided to comply.<\/p>\n
This is significant: even Toohoolhoolzote, even White Bird, even those who most deeply resented the order, made the decision to attempt the move rather than to resist it directly.<\/p>\n
They were trying to avoid war.<\/p>\n
They were making an agonizing concession under duress, giving up homelands that their fathers had refused to give up, because the alternative was armed confrontation with the United States Army.<\/p>\n
The Wallowa band gathered at the crossing point on the Snake River.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The crossing cost them heavily: horses and cattle were lost in the swift current, swept away by water that no orderly crossing could manage in the spring flood season.<\/p>\n
The losses were significant.<\/p>\n
The bands gathered at Tolo Lake, in the camas prairie country of Idaho, for what would be the last weeks of their traditional life in their homeland.<\/p>\n
It was an emotional time.<\/p>\n
Not everyone had reconciled themselves to what was happening.<\/p>\n
Some of the young men were furious at the loss of horses and land and the humiliation of the forced move.<\/p>\n
Some of the elders wept.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then violence erupted.<\/p>\n
The Killings That Ended The Peace<\/p>\n
On June 13, 1877, while the non-treaty bands were camped at Tolo Lake, three young warriors went on a raid along the Salmon River.<\/p>\n
The exact circumstances are disputed, and the accounts vary.<\/p>\n
What is established is that the raid resulted in the deaths of several white settlers on the Salmon River.<\/p>\n
A second raid followed on June 14 or 15, with more killings.<\/p>\n
The total number of settlers killed in these raids has been given as approximately fourteen to eighteen in different sources, with additional wounded.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The young men who carried out these raids were acting partly from fury over specific grievances \u2014 the murder of a warrior’s father by a settler, ongoing cattle raids by settlers on nim\u00edipuu herds \u2014 and partly from the general rage that had been building for years as the nim\u00edipuu watched their country taken and their people humiliated.<\/p>\n
But they were acting without the authorization of the leaders, and the leaders understood immediately what the consequences would be.<\/p>\n
Whatever possibility of a peaceful move to the reservation had existed before June 13 was gone.<\/p>\n
The army would come now.<\/p>\n
It would not ask questions about who had done what.<\/p>\n
The non-treaty bands, as a collective, would be held responsible.<\/p>\n
The leaders debated their options.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were still at Tolo Lake, within the thirty-day deadline Howard had set, still technically in the process of complying.<\/p>\n
They sent word to Howard’s representatives about what had happened.<\/p>\n
They waited, hoping for some possibility of a negotiated outcome.<\/p>\n
The army did not negotiate.<\/p>\n
Captain David Perry at Fort Lapwai received orders from Howard: go get them.<\/p>\n
“You must not get whipped.”<\/p>\n
Perry gathered 106 soldiers of the 1st Cavalry and eleven civilian volunteers and rode for White Bird Canyon, where the nim\u00edipuu had moved from Tolo Lake.<\/p>\n
They rode through the night, pushing hard for more than seventy miles.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The horses and men arrived at the canyon exhausted.<\/p>\n
Perry had been told by his civilian guide, Arthur “Ad” Chapman, that the valley floor was smooth enough for cavalry operations.<\/p>\n
The guide was wrong about more than the terrain.<\/p>\n
White Bird Canyon \u2014 The War Begins<\/p>\n
On the morning of June 17, 1877, as Perry’s column descended toward the nim\u00edipuu camp at Lahmotta, in the canyon along White Bird Creek, a peace party came out to meet them.<\/p>\n
Yellow Wolf later described what happened.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Five warriors, led by the man known as Wettiwetti Howlis, rode out from the western side of the valley as a peace party to meet the soldiers.<\/p>\n
They had specific instructions from the chiefs: do not fire unless fired upon.<\/p>\n
They carried a white flag.<\/p>\n
The advance party of Perry’s column included regular soldiers and civilian volunteers.<\/p>\n
When the peace party approached, one of the civilians \u2014 Arthur Chapman, the same guide who had brought Perry into the canyon \u2014 fired at the Nez Perce delegation.<\/p>\n
The peace party scattered.<\/p>\n
The battle began.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What followed was not a battle between equal opponents in terms of position or preparation.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu warriors, perhaps seventy in number, knew every feature of the canyon where they had been camping.<\/p>\n
They occupied the ridgelines that overlooked the narrow canyon floor.<\/p>\n
Perry’s exhausted cavalry, operating on terrain they had never seen before, were at a catastrophic tactical disadvantage.<\/p>\n
White Bird and Ollokot directed the nim\u00edipuu defense.<\/p>\n
The army column’s left flank collapsed when a bugler who was to signal the attack was shot early in the fighting, disrupting Perry’s communications.<\/p>\n
Lieutenant Edward Theller led a small group forward and was overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The soldiers began to retreat, then the retreat became a rout.<\/p>\n
When the fighting ended, 34 of Perry’s soldiers were dead.<\/p>\n
Four more were wounded.<\/p>\n
Two civilian volunteers were wounded.<\/p>\n
On the nim\u00edipuu side: three warriors were wounded.<\/p>\n
None were killed.<\/p>\n
It was the most decisive American military defeat in the entire campaign \u2014 and it came in the first engagement, before the full weight of the army’s response had even been organized.<\/p>\n
This outcome presented the non-treaty leaders with an immediate and terrible problem.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They had won decisively.<\/p>\n
They had demonstrated that they could fight.<\/p>\n
And now what?<\/p>\n
They were still in the middle of Idaho Territory, the army was still coming, and the killings of settlers on the Salmon River had foreclosed any possibility that the U.S. government would simply accept a military defeat and negotiate.<\/p>\n
The question of what to do now was one the council would debate and the answer they chose \u2014 to keep moving, to try to find safety somewhere \u2014 would determine the trajectory of the next 1,170 miles.<\/p>\n
The Decision To Keep Moving<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu council debated their options after White Bird Canyon.<\/p>\n
Some voices favored attempting to make peace from a position of military strength \u2014 they had just inflicted a significant defeat on the army, and perhaps the government would be willing to negotiate rather than commit to further fighting.<\/p>\n
This hope, however understandable, was not realistic.<\/p>\n
The United States Army in 1877 did not respond to a military defeat on American soil by negotiating with the people who had inflicted it.<\/p>\n
The more realistic voices understood that Howard’s full column \u2014 more than 400 soldiers \u2014 was already in the field and that reinforcements would come.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The non-treaty bands were outnumbered.<\/p>\n
Their advantage was mobility, terrain knowledge, and military skill.<\/p>\n
Their disadvantage was that they had families and elderly and children and they could not simply become a mobile fighting force the way the army could.<\/p>\n
The decision was made to cross Lolo Pass, the difficult mountain route over the Bitterroot range into Montana.<\/p>\n
In Montana, there were possible allies.<\/p>\n
The Crow people, who had traditionally maintained good relationships with the nim\u00edipuu, might provide sanctuary.<\/p>\n
Or, if that failed, the Canadian border offered another kind of safety: the “Medicine Line,” as Indigenous people called it, where American soldiers could not legally follow.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu crossed Lolo Pass.<\/p>\n
Howard’s column pursued.<\/p>\n
In Montana, the Bitterroot settlers and the army post at Fort Missoula attempted to block the route \u2014 in what became known derisively as Fort Fizzle, a log barricade that the nim\u00edipuu simply bypassed.<\/p>\n
The Montana settlers in the Bitterroot Valley largely allowed the nim\u00edipuu to pass through in peace, apparently satisfied with assurances that the people were not seeking to harm them.<\/p>\n
The flight was still in its early stage, and the council still hoped to find a peaceful resolution somewhere to the east or north.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then the Big Hole happened, and hope became something different.<\/p>\n
Big Hole: The Break<\/p>\n
Colonel John Gibbon marched his infantry from Fort Shaw in Montana to intercept the nim\u00edipuu as they moved through the Big Hole Valley.<\/p>\n
He caught them on the morning of August 9, 1877.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu had made camp in the Big Hole to rest.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass, who had taken on much of the leadership of the march, had convinced the council that they needed to slow down, that the army was behind them and had been outraced, that people and horses needed recovery time.<\/p>\n
The decision to stop and rest at Big Hole was, in hindsight, catastrophic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gibbon struck before dawn.<\/p>\n
The soldiers’ initial assault entered the sleeping camp.<\/p>\n
Men, women, and children were caught in their lodges.<\/p>\n
The first moments were a massacre.<\/p>\n
Warriors rallied quickly \u2014 White Bird and other leaders worked to organize resistance \u2014 but the initial shock produced deaths that haunted survivors for the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n
White Bird is credited in the accounts with extraordinary personal leadership during the defense at Big Hole.<\/p>\n
He was elderly, not a young warrior, but he moved through the fighting and helped coordinate the defense that pushed Gibbon’s command back and eventually laid siege to the soldiers themselves, pinning Gibbon’s wounded men on a hillside until Howard’s advance arrived to relieve them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the losses among the nim\u00edipuu at Big Hole were severe and irreversible.<\/p>\n
Estimates vary across sources, but nim\u00edipuu casualties at Big Hole were significant \u2014 including losses among women and children in the initial assault on the camp.<\/p>\n
Among the dead were several important warriors and, in the accounts of survivors, a significant number of people who were not combatants at all.<\/p>\n
The psychological impact was profound.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu had suffered losses before.<\/p>\n
They had seen what the army was willing to do.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But Big Hole \u2014 the predawn attack on a sleeping camp, the killing of women and children in their lodges \u2014 produced a specific kind of trauma that survivors described for decades afterward.<\/p>\n
The flight continued.<\/p>\n
But what continued after Big Hole was a different flight from the one that had started at White Bird Canyon.<\/p>\n
The Journey Through Yellowstone<\/p>\n
After Big Hole, the nim\u00edipuu pushed southeast, through a country that presented both tactical options and human uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Camas Meadows, in August, produced another engagement \u2014 a nim\u00edipuu raid that drove off several hundred of Howard’s mules, disrupting his pursuit.<\/p>\n
It was a practical military success: without mules, Howard’s column could not move quickly with its supplies, and the delay gave the nim\u00edipuu time to extend their lead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The movement through what is now Yellowstone National Park was a strange and disorienting passage.<\/p>\n
Yellowstone had been established as the first national park in 1872, and by 1877 it was already attracting tourists.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu, exhausted and grieving and carrying their wounded and elderly across difficult terrain, encountered groups of American tourists who were visiting the geysers and hot springs.<\/p>\n
Some of these encounters resulted in the capture of tourists, whom the nim\u00edipuu held briefly and then released.<\/p>\n
Some accounts describe the nim\u00edipuu as attempting to avoid confrontation; others record shootings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The full picture of what happened in Yellowstone is complicated and the accounts from both sides differ.<\/p>\n
What is clear is that the nim\u00edipuu were not a military force operating in a vacuum \u2014 they were families in motion through a landscape where American civilians had begun to arrive, and the encounters created both tactical and ethical complications.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass continued to argue that the Crow would provide sanctuary, and the council directed the route toward Crow territory.<\/p>\n
The hope was that old allies would offer shelter and assistance, or at minimum that the Crow would not help the army against them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Crow, however, had their own calculations to make.<\/p>\n
They had their own agreements with the U.S. government, their own vulnerability.<\/p>\n
When the nim\u00edipuu scouts made contact with Crow leaders and asked for help, the answer was not what they had hoped for.<\/p>\n
Some accounts indicate that Crow warriors actively assisted the Army in following the nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
The alliance did not materialize.<\/p>\n
The option of Canada \u2014 always present in the background \u2014 became the only remaining direction.<\/p>\n
Canyon Creek And The Grinding Down<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At Canyon Creek in Montana, Colonel Samuel Sturgis with elements of the 7th Cavalry attempted to block the nim\u00edipuu as they moved north.<\/p>\n
The battle at Canyon Creek on September 13 was not a decisive engagement in military terms, but it cost the nim\u00edipuu something they could not afford to lose: horses.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu’s horses were their speed, their logistics, their ability to carry children and elderly people and supplies.<\/p>\n
Throughout the flight, the size of the horse herd had been a critical factor.<\/p>\n
At Canyon Creek, a significant number of horses were lost \u2014 driven off or captured by the soldiers \u2014 and the loss slowed the march and put more weight on the people who now had to move on foot or with reduced carrying capacity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The human costs accumulated in other ways too.<\/p>\n
People were exhausted.<\/p>\n
The wounds from Big Hole and subsequent skirmishes were still affecting those who had survived them.<\/p>\n
Elderly people and small children were suffering the consequences of months of forced marching under conditions of cold, inadequate food, and constant anxiety.<\/p>\n
It is important to understand the nim\u00edipuu column not as a military formation but as what it actually was: a community in flight.<\/p>\n
It included grandmothers and toddlers and wounded warriors and nursing mothers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The decisions about pace and route were not made solely in terms of military advantage; they were made in the context of whether particular people could survive particular choices.<\/p>\n
Every leader in the council was aware of this.<\/p>\n
Every decision about how fast to push, how far to move in a day, where to stop and rest, reflected the tension between the military requirement of outrunning the army and the human requirement of keeping the most vulnerable members of the community alive.<\/p>\n
After Canyon Creek, the Cow Island crossing of the Missouri River and the skirmish at Cow Creek Canyon \u2014 where the nim\u00edipuu raided a supply depot that provided needed food \u2014 brought the flight into the final stretch of Montana before the Bear Paw Mountains.<\/p>\n
The Canadian border was getting close.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The council knew it.<\/p>\n
The people knew it.<\/p>\n
They rested at the place called C’aynnim Alikinwaaspa.<\/p>\n
The Bear Paw: Arrival And Attack<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu reached the Bear Paw Mountains in late September 1877, and the Snake Creek drainage \u2014 C’aynnim Alikinwaaspa \u2014 offered water, game, and a protected campsite.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass, who had taken on significant leadership responsibility during the march, argued for a rest.<\/p>\n
Howard’s column was behind them, apparently no longer close enough to be an immediate threat.<\/p>\n
The horses needed grazing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
People needed food and recovery time.<\/p>\n
The camp they made at Snake Creek was intended as a rest stop, not a permanent position.<\/p>\n
The fatal calculation was about Colonel Nelson Miles.<\/p>\n
Miles had been stationed at Tongue River Cantonment in eastern Montana, on the Yellowstone River.<\/p>\n
When word reached him about the nim\u00edipuu flight and their direction, he marched rapidly northwest across the Montana plains with approximately 450 soldiers \u2014 a mixed force of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, including scouts from the Cheyenne nation who knew how to track across open country.<\/p>\n
The rapid march was nearly 200 miles in cold autumn weather, accomplished quickly enough to reach the Bear Paw Mountains before the nim\u00edipuu leadership expected any army column from that direction.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the morning of September 30, 1877, Miles attacked.<\/p>\n
The initial assault came with cavalry and was initially successful in capturing most of the nim\u00edipuu horse herd \u2014 the horses that had been grazing away from the camp’s defensive perimeter.<\/p>\n
Without those horses, the option of immediate flight was eliminated for most of the people in camp.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu warriors defended the camp’s ravines and rifle pits against the cavalry assault.<\/p>\n
The fighting was intense.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Miles lost several officers and dozens of soldiers in the initial engagement, including two captains.<\/p>\n
The assault stalled.<\/p>\n
Miles settled in for a siege.<\/p>\n
The artillery began.<\/p>\n
Five Days<\/p>\n
The siege at Bear Paw lasted five days, September 30 to October 5, 1877.<\/p>\n
During those five days, Miles directed artillery fire at the camp’s defensive positions, particularly at the areas where families were sheltered.<\/p>\n
The cold deepened as October arrived.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Food was running short.<\/p>\n
The wounded from the initial assault needed care that could barely be provided.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass, who had maintained the role of primary military commander through much of the flight, was killed on October 4.<\/p>\n
He had been watching the approaches to the camp, reportedly hopeful that the Lakota from Sitting Bull’s camp in Canada \u2014 not far north of the border \u2014 might send a relief party.<\/p>\n
He was struck by a bullet in the forehead and died immediately.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ollokot, Joseph’s younger brother and the Wallowa band’s warrior leader, had been killed in the first day’s fighting.<\/p>\n
Toohoolhoolzote was also dead \u2014 killed in the initial assault.<\/p>\n
The deaths of these leaders, alongside the cold and the hunger and the confinement and the artillery fire, were systematically destroying the coherence of the nim\u00edipuu resistance.<\/p>\n
Miles had also attempted to negotiate.<\/p>\n
He met with Joseph under a flag of truce on October 1, and the meeting did not end well \u2014 Miles held Joseph and refused to release him until the nim\u00edipuu returned a soldier they were holding.<\/p>\n
The exchange was eventually made, but the episode demonstrated to the nim\u00edipuu leadership that Miles was willing to violate the protocols of truce negotiation when it served his purposes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Howard arrived at Bear Paw on October 4 with a small retinue \u2014 the rest of his army had already been sent home.<\/p>\n
His presence was not made known to the nim\u00edipuu still in camp.<\/p>\n
As far as White Bird and Joseph knew, they might be facing a second army coming to reinforce Miles.<\/p>\n
The people in camp were in desperate condition.<\/p>\n
The cold was now severe.<\/p>\n
There was almost no food.<\/p>\n
Wounds were festering.<\/p>\n
Children were dying.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
October 5: The Final Morning<\/p>\n
On the morning of October 5, two treaty Nez Perce men who had been accompanying Howard’s column entered the camp at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
Their names were Captain John and Old George, and they came as intermediaries \u2014 nim\u00edipuu themselves, from the bands that had signed the 1863 treaty and accepted the Lapwai Reservation.<\/p>\n
They brought the army’s terms to White Bird and Joseph, the two remaining hereditary leaders in camp.<\/p>\n
The message, as the NPS Bear Paw Battlefield account describes it: the leaders will not be killed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The people will be returned to Idaho.<\/p>\n
The army wants to quit fighting.<\/p>\n
These terms were not nothing.<\/p>\n
They addressed the most immediate fears: that the leaders would be executed and that the people would be permanently separated from their homeland.<\/p>\n
The assurance that they would be returned to Idaho, specifically, was significant \u2014 it addressed the most fundamental loss of the entire 1877 crisis, which was not the fighting itself but the threat of permanent displacement from everything they knew.<\/p>\n
Joseph and White Bird, according to the historical accounts, had different responses to these assurances.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joseph, dealing with the people still trapped in the camp \u2014 the wounded, the children, the elderly, the people who physically could not move any farther \u2014 decided to accept.<\/p>\n
He would end the fighting.<\/p>\n
The decision was not made easily or gladly.<\/p>\n
It was made because the people in his immediate care were suffering and dying, and because he understood that accepting the terms was the only way to stop that.<\/p>\n
White Bird’s response was different.<\/p>\n
He had spent seventy-some years watching what the United States government promised and what it delivered.<\/p>\n
He had watched the 1855 treaty give way to the 1863 steal treaty.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had watched Howard give a thirty-day deadline for an impossible move.<\/p>\n
He had watched the army attack a camp that was in the process of complying with that order.<\/p>\n
He had watched the soldiers attack with artillery at Big Hole.<\/p>\n
He had watched Miles hold Joseph under a truce flag.<\/p>\n
The army’s promises, in White Bird’s assessment, were not worth the trust required to act on them.<\/p>\n
He would not surrender.<\/p>\n
The Escape: What The Sources Actually Say<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here the historical record requires careful handling, because the story of White Bird’s escape from Bear Paw has sometimes been told with a dramatic simplicity that the sources do not quite support.<\/p>\n
The NPS Bear Paw Battlefield page describes the outcome plainly: White Bird escaped with about 30 followers during the night of October 4-5 and reached Canada.<\/p>\n
Subsequent movements of nim\u00edipuu refugees out of the Bear Paw area and northward across the Medicine Line brought the total number of people who eventually reached Canada to approximately 300.<\/p>\n
The EBSCO historical summary describes White Bird escaping with approximately twenty other leaders and two hundred followers.<\/p>\n
The Native American Netroots account, citing the record of North-West Mounted Police Superintendent James Walsh, describes Walsh counting 290 Nez Perce refugees among the Lakota at Sitting Bull’s camp in late October, including 90 men and 200 women and children.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What these accounts describe is not a single dramatic nighttime breakout of nearly 300 people from a besieged camp.<\/p>\n
It is something more complex: an initial escape by White Bird with a relatively small group, followed by a period in which other nim\u00edipuu individuals and groups \u2014 some from the Bear Paw camp, some who had been in the surrounding area \u2014 made their way north across the Canadian border in separate movements.<\/p>\n
The sources are not entirely consistent on the details of exactly who left when and in what groupings.<\/p>\n
What is documented is:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird refused to surrender.<\/p>\n
He escaped the Bear Paw area rather than submit to army authority.<\/p>\n
The people who eventually reached Canada numbered in the hundreds \u2014 approximately 300, based on Walsh’s count in October 1877.<\/p>\n
They arrived not as a single organized group but in separate parties, over a period of days and weeks.<\/p>\n
When Walsh met with the refugees in late October, he met with White Bird as their representative, and White Bird recounted the story of what the nim\u00edipuu had endured.<\/p>\n
The escape was real.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was not a single cinematic moment.<\/p>\n
It was what it actually was: a desperate flight across the final forty miles, made possible partly by the chaos of the siege and the fact that Miles could not completely encircle the nim\u00edipuu position, accomplished by people who were already accustomed to moving in difficult conditions and who had less to lose than they had gained by compliance.<\/p>\n
Joseph’s Surrender: What He Said \u2014 And What Was Written<\/p>\n
The document known as Chief Joseph’s surrender speech is one of the most famous pieces of text associated with the Nez Perce War.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Its most famous line \u2014 “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever” \u2014 has been quoted in hundreds of contexts, reproduced on historical markers, and embedded in the popular American memory of the 1877 events.<\/p>\n
The historical reality of this speech requires care.<\/p>\n
The text that appears in most accounts was not transcribed directly from Joseph’s spoken words in Nez Perce.<\/p>\n
It was transmitted through interpreters, recorded by officers, and published in various forms \u2014 some more stylized than others.<\/p>\n
Scholars have noted that the language of the published versions, particularly the most famous literary version, bears signs of editorial refinement that may not represent Joseph’s precise words as he spoke them.<\/p>\n
This does not mean Joseph said nothing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He did surrender, on October 5, 1877.<\/p>\n
He handed his rifle to Colonel Miles.<\/p>\n
He spoke through interpreters.<\/p>\n
He expressed his grief and his exhaustion and the weight of the decision he was making on behalf of the people still in camp.<\/p>\n
The emotional reality of the speech \u2014 regardless of the exact words \u2014 was genuine.<\/p>\n
What is important to understand is that Joseph was not surrendering for the entire nim\u00edipuu nation, and he was not surrendering on White Bird’s behalf.<\/p>\n
He was ending the fighting for the people still with him, the people still in the Bear Paw camp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird had already made his own decision.<\/p>\n
The NPS memorial associated with Joseph’s speech acknowledges White Bird’s refusal directly: on that same October 5, the two remaining hereditary leaders made different choices, and the historical record contains both.<\/p>\n
Reaching Canada: The Medicine Line<\/p>\n
The “Medicine Line” \u2014 the 49th parallel, the international boundary between the United States and Canada \u2014 was not physically distinct from the country on either side of it.<\/p>\n
The same rolling plains of Montana continued into the same rolling plains of what is now the province of Saskatchewan.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The line was invisible on the land.<\/p>\n
But it carried specific and significant meaning.<\/p>\n
American soldiers could not legally pursue Indigenous people across it.<\/p>\n
The authority of the United States Army stopped at the border.<\/p>\n
Canada had different laws and different relationships with Indigenous people \u2014 not necessarily better ones, but different ones, governed by different institutions and operating under different rules.<\/p>\n
For Sitting Bull and his Lakota followers, who had crossed the Medicine Line in 1876 after the Little Bighorn, the border had provided a specific kind of sanctuary.<\/p>\n
The North-West Mounted Police \u2014 the Mounties \u2014 administered the Canadian territories with far fewer personnel than the American army deployed, and their approach to the Lakota refugees had been different from the American approach: negotiating, establishing relationships, enforcing Canadian law without the scale of military force that characterized American Indian policy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird and the nim\u00edipuu refugees who reached Canada crossed this line in October 1877 and found their way to the camp where Sitting Bull’s Lakota were living.<\/p>\n
James Walsh, the North-West Mounted Police Superintendent who had established a working relationship with Sitting Bull, met with the nim\u00edipuu refugees on October 22, 1877.<\/p>\n
The meeting took place in the center of Sitting Bull’s Sioux camp.<\/p>\n
Walsh counted 290 Nez Perce refugees: 90 men and 200 women and children.<\/p>\n
White Bird spoke for his people.<\/p>\n
He described what the nim\u00edipuu had endured across more than 1,170 miles.<\/p>\n
He recounted the broken promises, the forced move, the attacks on peaceful camps, the relentless pursuit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Walsh was sympathetic, but he had to explain Canadian reality.<\/p>\n
Canada would not allow the nim\u00edipuu to raid into the United States.<\/p>\n
The Lakota were already a logistical and political challenge for the Canadian government, and the addition of hundreds of nim\u00edipuu refugees complicated the situation further.<\/p>\n
The refugees were told they were welcome to stay in Canada as long as they observed Canadian law.<\/p>\n
What Canada could not offer was any mechanism for returning their homeland, any recourse for what had been done to them, any resolution to the crisis that had produced their exile.<\/p>\n
The Exile In Canada: Fragmentation<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Life in exile in Canada was not the sanctuary the nim\u00edipuu had hoped for.<\/p>\n
The Lakota hosts were generous within their capacity, but they were themselves refugees in a precarious situation.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull’s people had their own resource pressures, their own uncertain relationship with the Canadian authorities, and their own eventual trajectory back toward the United States and surrender.<\/p>\n
For the nim\u00edipuu refugees, the first Canadian winter was hard.<\/p>\n
The buffalo herds that the Lakota depended on were thinning rapidly \u2014 overhunting and habitat disruption were already in the process of eliminating the Plains buffalo, and by the late 1870s the herds were a shadow of what they had once been.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu, who were plateau people rather than plains hunters by tradition, faced the challenge of subsisting in an environment that was already under pressure.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
People drifted.<\/p>\n
The refugees were not a single organized community; they were the remnant of multiple bands, brought together by crisis, and the social and political structures that had organized nim\u00edipuu life before 1877 were disrupted or destroyed.<\/p>\n
Some people could not survive the exile.<\/p>\n
Some died from illness and deprivation in Canada in the months after the escape.<\/p>\n
Others \u2014 beginning in 1878, as the immediate danger of American military pursuit receded \u2014 began to drift back south across the Medicine Line, trying to return to the Lapwai Reservation or to family members who had surrendered at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
Small parties crossed the border quietly, hoping to slip into the reservation without attracting attention.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The U.S.<\/p>\n
Army was waiting for them.<\/p>\n
Some parties that crossed back were captured.<\/p>\n
Some were killed.<\/p>\n
The Assiniboine and Gros Ventre nations, hired by the army to seek out returning nim\u00edipuu, tracked some of the returnees.<\/p>\n
The conditions of return were not what Joseph and the others who had surrendered at Bear Paw had been promised.<\/p>\n
What Happened To Those Who Surrendered<\/p>\n
The army’s assurances at Bear Paw \u2014 that the leaders would not be killed, that the people would be returned to Idaho \u2014 were not honored in the way the nim\u00edipuu had understood them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 418 people who surrendered with Joseph at Bear Paw were not sent to Idaho.<\/p>\n
They were transported to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a military post where they spent the winter of 1877-1878 in conditions that contributed to significant illness and death.<\/p>\n
Malaria, to which people from the plateau country had little immunity, struck the population held in the low-lying bottomlands near Fort Leavenworth.<\/p>\n
From Fort Leavenworth, the survivors were sent to Indian Territory \u2014 what is now Oklahoma \u2014 an environment even less suited to plateau people than Kansas.<\/p>\n
The Eekish Pah, which the nim\u00edipuu called the “hot place,” was far from the salmon rivers and mountain country of their homeland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Disease continued to kill people.<\/p>\n
Children died.<\/p>\n
Elderly people died.<\/p>\n
Joseph petitioned.<\/p>\n
He wrote letters.<\/p>\n
He met with government officials.<\/p>\n
He spoke publicly.<\/p>\n
He traveled to Washington and met with presidents.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He gave the accounts of what had happened that were quoted, paraphrased, and eventually published in ways that made him, in American popular understanding, the face of the Nez Perce cause.<\/p>\n
The people remained in Indian Territory for years.<\/p>\n
A portion of the surviving nim\u00edipuu were eventually allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest in 1885 \u2014 but not to the Wallowa Valley.<\/p>\n
They were sent to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho.<\/p>\n
The Wallowa band, including Joseph himself, was sent instead to the Colville Reservation in Washington Territory, further from their homeland.<\/p>\n
Joseph never received permission to return to the Wallowa Valley.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died on the Colville Reservation in 1904.<\/p>\n
The doctor who attended him reportedly said he had died of a broken heart, though such a diagnosis is medical metaphor rather than clinical finding.<\/p>\n
The army’s promises at Bear Paw, in short, were honored in form but not in spirit, and not in the specific way that the assurance of return to Idaho had been understood.<\/p>\n
White Bird, who had not trusted those promises, had made a calculation that the subsequent history vindicated.<\/p>\n
Why These Two Decisions Must Be Understood Together<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The contrast between Joseph’s surrender and White Bird’s escape is sometimes framed as a contrast between weakness and strength, or between accommodation and resistance.<\/p>\n
This framing is inadequate and ultimately inaccurate.<\/p>\n
Joseph’s decision to accept the surrender terms was not a failure of will or an acceptance of defeat on philosophical grounds.<\/p>\n
It was a practical response to the conditions of the people still in his immediate care.<\/p>\n
The people in the Bear Paw camp on October 5 were, in the NPS account’s language, frozen, starving, and exhausted.<\/p>\n
Several of the most important warrior leaders were dead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Most of the horses were gone.<\/p>\n
The artillery had been hitting the area where families sheltered.<\/p>\n
Children were dying.<\/p>\n
Joseph could attempt to escape with his people, or he could accept terms that promised to stop the dying immediately.<\/p>\n
He chose to stop the dying.<\/p>\n
The choice was made with knowledge that the army’s promises might not be honored, and with grief, and with a specific responsibility to the people he could still protect in that moment.<\/p>\n
White Bird’s choice was different because his situation was different.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was not surrounded by the same concentration of wounded and non-ambulatory people that Joseph faced.<\/p>\n
He had maintained a position or group that could move.<\/p>\n
And he had spent enough of his long life watching the army’s promises dissolve to conclude that trusting these particular promises would lead to permanent loss and eventual death in an unfamiliar place.<\/p>\n
Both men were right about the specific situations they faced.<\/p>\n
Both decisions were made in good faith within genuine constraint.<\/p>\n
The subsequent history validates aspects of each perspective: those who surrendered did eventually \u2014 after years of exile and significant loss \u2014 return to the Northwest, but not to their homelands, and not as Joseph had understood the terms at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those who escaped to Canada lived as refugees in difficult conditions, some died there, and many eventually returned to face the same restricted reservation life.<\/p>\n
Neither decision produced safety or justice for the nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
Both decisions reflected the choices of intelligent men in impossible situations, doing the best they could within constraints they had not made and could not remove.<\/p>\n
White Bird In Canada: The Later Years<\/p>\n
White Bird spent the remaining years of his life in Canada, never returning to the United States.<\/p>\n
The specific details of his life after the flight are less thoroughly documented than the dramatic events of 1877.<\/p>\n
Historical sources indicate that he lived among the Lakota followers of Sitting Bull near Fort Walsh in Saskatchewan for some years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The exile community gradually dispersed as people returned to the United States or died.<\/p>\n
Some sources state that White Bird died in Canada around 1882, approximately five years after the escape from Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
The EBSCO historical summary mentions that his death resulted from “a personal conflict,” though the specific circumstances are not reliably documented in the available sources, and it would be inappropriate to state the details with false confidence.<\/p>\n
He spent his final years in exile from the Salmon River country where he had spent most of his life.<\/p>\n
He had reached the border but could not go home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had escaped the army but could not escape the displacement.<\/p>\n
The man who had gone to the Bear Paw with perhaps sixty to seventy years of life behind him, who had refused to sign the 1863 treaty, who had participated in council debates that sought peaceful resolution all the way up to the moment when the army made peace impossible, who had led warriors at White Bird Canyon and Big Hole, who had made the final calculation at Bear Paw \u2014 died in Canada, in exile, as the nim\u00edipuu who had surrendered with Joseph were beginning the long process of arguing and petitioning and waiting for permission to return to the Northwest.<\/p>\n
There is no record of whether White Bird regarded his choice as the right one.<\/p>\n
The sources do not give us his reflections in exile.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What they give us is the fact of his choice and the fact that he lived with it until he died.<\/p>\n
The Broader Failure Of The Promises Made At Bear Paw<\/p>\n
The historical record of what happened to the nim\u00edipuu after Bear Paw is essential context for understanding White Bird’s decision \u2014 not because it validates that decision as obviously correct (he could not have known in October 1877 what would happen to those who surrendered), but because it reveals what the nim\u00edipuu had reason to fear from the army’s promises.<\/p>\n
The pattern of broken promises went back decades.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1855 treaty had guaranteed a large reservation; the 1863 treaty reduced it by ninety percent, and the leaders who had not signed the 1863 treaty were never compensated or heard.<\/p>\n
Howard’s assurances that the move to Lapwai would be conducted humanely had been followed immediately by the army’s attack at White Bird Canyon.<\/p>\n
Miles had held Joseph under a truce flag.<\/p>\n
And now the assurances of return to Idaho were followed by Fort Leavenworth and Indian Territory.<\/p>\n
None of this means that every individual soldier or official was acting in bad faith at every moment.<\/p>\n
Some of the people who made promises at Bear Paw believed they were offering what they had the authority to offer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Miles himself apparently believed the Idaho assurance would be honored, and he later expressed frustration when the government overrode the terms.<\/p>\n
But the pattern, from the perspective of nim\u00edipuu leaders with decades of experience watching American promises dissolve, was consistent.<\/p>\n
The formal terms of agreements were one thing; what actually happened to the people after those agreements were signed was another.<\/p>\n
White Bird had watched this pattern long enough to draw a clear conclusion.<\/p>\n
The Nez Perce National Historic Trail<\/p>\n
Today, the path that the nim\u00edipuu traveled in 1877 \u2014 more than 1,170 miles across Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming \u2014 is designated as the Nez Perce National Historic Trail.<\/p>\n
The trail connects dozens of sites that are managed by the National Park Service and Forest Service, including the White Bird Battlefield in Idaho, the Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana, and the Bear Paw Battlefield in Montana.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Together, these sites form one of the most extensive networks of historic preservation related to the conflict between the United States and any Indigenous nation.<\/p>\n
The Bear Paw Battlefield, located about sixteen miles south of Chinook, Montana, preserves the landscape of the siege.<\/p>\n
The rolling hills of Snake Creek drainage, the shallow ravines where the nim\u00edipuu built rifle pits, the approaches from which Miles’s cavalry attacked \u2014 these are still recognizable in the landscape.<\/p>\n
The NPS manages the site as part of the Big Hole National Battlefield administrative unit.<\/p>\n
Visiting these sites is possible today, and the NPS interpretation at each one attempts to present multiple perspectives: the military perspective, the settler perspective, and \u2014 with increasing care and depth in recent years \u2014 the nim\u00edipuu perspective.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The tribal nation that includes the descendants of the 1877 non-treaty bands participates in interpretation and preservation.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu Perspective: Memory And Meaning<\/p>\n
For the Nez Perce Tribe, based at Lapwai, Idaho, the 1877 Flight is not simply a historical event.<\/p>\n
It is living memory, part of the cultural identity and ongoing history of a people who continue to exist and continue to maintain relationships with the places their ancestors traveled and fought and died.<\/p>\n
The Nez Perce Tribe’s own website and documentation describe the 1877 events from the perspective of a community that has never entirely made peace with what happened \u2014 not because the tribal nation seeks to reopen military conflict, but because the displacement and the broken promises were never fully addressed or remedied.<\/p>\n
The Wallowa Valley, from which Joseph’s band was forced to relocate, has been the subject of ongoing conversation between the Nez Perce Tribe and the state of Oregon and the various landowners of the valley.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question of the nim\u00edipuu’s relationship to their original homeland \u2014 which was never ceded by the bands who refused the 1863 treaty \u2014 remains historically and politically unresolved in ways that the passage of 150 years has not settled.<\/p>\n
The names of the places matter.<\/p>\n
The name C’aynnim Alikinwaaspa \u2014 Place of the Manure Fire \u2014 is the nim\u00edipuu name for Bear Paw, a name that exists in a different relationship to the landscape than the colonial name applied by the army.<\/p>\n
Using these names alongside the English names is one small way of acknowledging that the landscape has a history that predates the 1877 battle and that belongs to people for whom the place means something that military maps do not capture.<\/p>\n
Annual ceremonial rides and marches along the 1877 route, organized in collaboration with multiple tribal nations and interested communities, bring people together to walk or ride the trail as an act of remembrance and cultural continuity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These are not re-enactments in the theatrical sense; they are acts of living connection to an event that shaped the communities that exist today.<\/p>\n
Why The Flight Did Not End At Bear Paw<\/p>\n
The standard narrative of the Nez Perce War ends at Bear Paw, with Joseph’s surrender and his famous speech.<\/p>\n
This ending is understandable as a narrative device \u2014 the speech is genuinely moving, the visual image of surrender is historically significant, and the Bear Paw was the last major military engagement of the 1877 conflict.<\/p>\n
But it is not accurate as a description of what actually happened.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1877 conflict did not have a single ending.<\/p>\n
It had multiple endings, and they were different for different groups of people.<\/p>\n
For the 418 people who surrendered with Joseph at Bear Paw, the ending \u2014 Fort Leavenworth, Indian Territory, eventual partial return \u2014 was one story.<\/p>\n
For the approximately 300 people who reached Canada, the ending was a different story: exile, fragmentation, some deaths in Canada, gradual return of many individuals across the Medicine Line, and eventual absorption into the reservation system they had fled.<\/p>\n
For White Bird specifically, the ending was exile in Canada until death \u2014 never returning, never surrendering, never placing himself under American authority.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For the treaty-band nim\u00edipuu who had remained on the Lapwai Reservation throughout \u2014 who had not participated in the flight, who had sometimes tried to mediate, who faced their own complications as relatives of people who had fought \u2014 the ending was yet another set of circumstances.<\/p>\n
And for the nim\u00edipuu descendants who live in the twenty-first century, the story has not ended at all.<\/p>\n
It has continuations: in the ongoing relationship between the tribe and the federal government, in the management of sacred sites, in the conversation about the Wallowa Valley, in the annual rides along the historic trail, in the language preservation efforts, in the ongoing presence of a people who survived what was intended to eliminate them as a distinct community.<\/p>\n
White Bird’s choice at Bear Paw was not the end of anything except his own participation in the specific engagement at Snake Creek.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He kept going.<\/p>\n
Others went different directions.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu as a people kept existing.<\/p>\n
The Second Chance At Canada That Nobody Talks About<\/p>\n
There is an aspect of the Bear Paw story that tends to be overlooked in the focus on October 5: the night of October 4.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass was killed on October 4, watching the northern approaches to the camp.<\/p>\n
The accounts of his death say he was watching hopefully, expecting help from the Lakota in Canada.<\/p>\n
He died looking north, in the direction of the border that the flight had been aimed at for weeks.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the night of October 4 to 5 \u2014 the night before Joseph’s surrender and White Bird’s departure \u2014 some number of nim\u00edipuu began moving north.<\/p>\n
White Bird was among them, or he left that night or the following night, under cover of darkness.<\/p>\n
The mechanics of how people got out of a besieged camp are not described in detail in the historical record.<\/p>\n
The camp’s position in the Snake Creek ravines was not perfectly encircled by Miles’s forces \u2014 the army’s lines were not tight enough to prevent movement through the broken terrain at night.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu were, above all, experienced movers across difficult country.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They had been doing it for four months.<\/p>\n
The people who left that night were taking a tremendous risk.<\/p>\n
The plains north of the Bear Paw Mountains were open country where mounted pursuit could be effective.<\/p>\n
The cold was severe.<\/p>\n
They were going without most of their horses.<\/p>\n
They would have to cover roughly forty miles to the border on foot or with very limited mounts.<\/p>\n
And they did.<\/p>\n
The forty miles that had been unreachable in the five days of the siege \u2014 because the army held the horses and controlled the approaches \u2014 were covered in the hours after the decision was made.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not all at once, not by everyone, not without suffering.<\/p>\n
But people got through.<\/p>\n
When Superintendent Walsh counted the refugees in October, he counted nearly 300.<\/p>\n
They had come through.<\/p>\n
The Soldiers Who Followed<\/p>\n
One aspect of the Canada story that deserves mention: the U.S.<\/p>\n
Army did not simply accept White Bird’s escape and move on.<\/p>\n
Some soldiers and scouts were used to track individuals or small parties who crossed back south from Canada, and the army recruited Assiniboine and Gros Ventre warriors to find and kill nim\u00edipuu who attempted to return to the United States.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This was the reality that awaited nim\u00edipuu refugees who tried to go home.<\/p>\n
The border provided some protection from the army itself, but crossing back was dangerous.<\/p>\n
Small parties were caught and some were killed.<\/p>\n
The Medicine Line was a refuge of a specific kind: it protected from the American army, but it did not protect from poverty, exile, cold, and the disruption of everything familiar.<\/p>\n
It was not safety in the full sense of the word.<\/p>\n
It was a different kind of precariousness from the siege at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird chose this precariousness over surrender.<\/p>\n
He is documented to have remained in Canada until his death around 1882.<\/p>\n
He never went home.<\/p>\n
The Wallowa Valley And What Was Never Resolved<\/p>\n
Joseph’s band was from the Wallowa Valley, the mountain-rimmed country of northeastern Oregon that Old Joseph had specifically instructed his son never to surrender.<\/p>\n
When Young Joseph signed the surrender terms at Bear Paw, he was not legally surrendering the Wallowa Valley \u2014 the 1877 conflict was about the army’s insistence on reservation confinement, not a treaty that would have transferred land.<\/p>\n
But the practical consequence of the surrender, and of the years of exile that followed, was that the Wallowa Valley continued to be occupied and developed by settler farmers and ranchers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When the surviving nim\u00edipuu were eventually allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest in 1885, those from the Wallowa band were sent to Colville in Washington, not to the Wallowa Valley in Oregon.<\/p>\n
The valley has been a continuing source of discussion and negotiation between the Nez Perce Tribe and public and private landowners for decades.<\/p>\n
In recent years, collaborative efforts have attempted to create mechanisms for the tribe to maintain a relationship with the valley \u2014 land agreements, cultural programs, ceremonial visits \u2014 that acknowledge the historical relationship without resolving the fundamental question of dispossession.<\/p>\n
Joseph’s death at Colville in 1904, far from the valley his father had told him never to surrender, is one of the bookmarks of this unresolved story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird’s death in Canada, also far from the Salmon River country he had led for decades, is another.<\/p>\n
What Forty Miles Actually Meant<\/p>\n
The headline of this article promises a chief who refused to surrender forty miles from Canada.<\/p>\n
The number is worth dwelling on.<\/p>\n
Forty miles, in October 1877, was not forty miles in the way that forty miles feels today.<\/p>\n
There were no roads across the northern Montana plains that the nim\u00edipuu could use safely.<\/p>\n
There were no supplies waiting at the border.<\/p>\n
There was no certainty that reaching the border would mean anything \u2014 the camp of the Lakota that offered the best possibility of immediate refuge was itself in motion and uncertain.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Forty miles on foot, in cold October weather, without adequate food, after five days of siege and months of flight and four months of war \u2014 this was not a short walk.<\/p>\n
It was an act of will against conditions that had already broken expeditions of professional soldiers.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu who made it \u2014 whether with White Bird on the night of October 4-5 or in subsequent days and weeks \u2014 made it because they had been making impossible moves for four months.<\/p>\n
They knew how to travel in hard conditions.<\/p>\n
They knew the terrain well enough to navigate.<\/p>\n
They knew that the border meant something specific and that reaching it was achievable.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And they knew, or believed, that what awaited them on the American side of Bear Paw \u2014 if they surrendered \u2014 was not a return to Idaho but something they could not fully know or trust.<\/p>\n
The Final Meaning: More Than One Ending<\/p>\n
The 1877 flight is sometimes called, in popular histories, the most brilliant strategic retreat in American military history.<\/p>\n
Military historians have analyzed the tactical decisions of the nim\u00edipuu leaders and found in them an extraordinary example of movement under pursuit, of small-scale tactical success against a technologically superior opponent, of leadership under impossible conditions.<\/p>\n
This framing \u2014 brilliant military retreat \u2014 is accurate as far as it goes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu were, by the military analysis, remarkably effective fighters and movers.<\/p>\n
They regularly defeated forces that outnumbered them in the specific engagements, and they covered ground that their pursuers thought was impassable.<\/p>\n
But the military analysis misses what the flight actually was.<\/p>\n
It was a family trying to stay alive.<\/p>\n
It was grandmothers and infants and warriors and young women and elderly men trying to keep moving when keeping moving was the only alternative to capture or death.<\/p>\n
It was leaders trying to make decisions in real time, with incomplete information, under conditions of exhaustion and grief, about what to do when every option carried severe costs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird’s choice at Bear Paw was the choice of a man who had spent his life watching what American power did with the people who trusted its promises.<\/p>\n
He looked at the terms offered by Miles and Howard and calculated that the cost of trusting them was higher than the cost of trying to reach Canada.<\/p>\n
He was not wrong about what happened to those who surrendered.<\/p>\n
He was also not surviving freely in Canada.<\/p>\n
There was no good option.<\/p>\n
There had not been a good option since the army attacked the peace party in White Bird Canyon in June 1877.<\/p>\n
The flight did not have one ending.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1877 crisis did not have one resolution.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu did not have one fate.<\/p>\n
Some died at Big Hole and at Bear Paw and in the cold of a Canadian winter.<\/p>\n
Some spent years in Indian Territory before returning, altered, to the Northwest.<\/p>\n
Some returned from Canada across the Medicine Line and were caught and some were not.<\/p>\n
Some reached Lapwai and spent decades trying to rebuild something from what remained.<\/p>\n
White Bird reached Canada and died there.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All of them \u2014 the ones who surrendered and the ones who escaped, the ones who survived and the ones who didn’t \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The Route Today<\/p>\n
If you drive north from Billings, Montana, on U.S.<\/p>\n
Highway 191 toward the town of Chinook, you will cross the kind of country that the nim\u00edipuu traveled in September and October 1877.<\/p>\n
The grass is still short and brown in autumn.<\/p>\n
The sky is enormous.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Bear Paw Battlefield is about sixteen miles south of Chinook.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is a parking area and interpretive signs.<\/p>\n
The ravines where the nim\u00edipuu dug their rifle pits are still visible.<\/p>\n
The terrain where Miles’s cavalry attacked on September 30 is largely unchanged.<\/p>\n
It is a quiet place, far from the major tourist corridors of Montana, visited by people who specifically seek it out.<\/p>\n
North of the battlefield, forty miles away as the crow flies, is the Canadian border.<\/p>\n
From the ridges above the battlefield, on a clear day, you can see a long way north.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Some of them made it.<\/p>\n
White Bird made it.<\/p>\n
He never came back.<\/p>\n
Remembering The Whole Story<\/p>\n
The story of the 1877 Flight of the nim\u00edipuu 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.<\/p>\n
The story does not belong to a simplified narrative in which the nim\u00edipuu were noble victims and the army was uniformly villainous, or in which the army was enforcing legitimate law and the nim\u00edipuu were simply criminals.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Both of those narratives fail the complexity of what actually happened.<\/p>\n
What actually happened was that the United States government, driven by settler pressure, reduced the nim\u00edipuu reservation without the consent of the bands most affected, then attempted to enforce that reduction by military power, and in doing so created a crisis that produced violence on all sides and ended in the permanent displacement of people from their ancestral homelands.<\/p>\n
The leaders who tried to navigate this crisis \u2014 White Bird, Joseph, Looking Glass, Ollokot, Toohoolhoolzote, and the council that guided decisions at each stage \u2014 were not perfect men making perfect decisions.<\/p>\n
They were men trying to protect their communities in conditions that their experience and their traditions had not prepared them for, against an adversary with resources they could not match, under time pressure that did not allow for careful deliberation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird lived longer than most of them.<\/p>\n
He reached Canada.<\/p>\n
He told his story to Superintendent Walsh in October 1877 \u2014 the story of what the nim\u00edipuu had endured, from the relocation order to White Bird Canyon to Big Hole to Bear Paw and beyond.<\/p>\n
Walsh listened.<\/p>\n
He wrote it down.<\/p>\n
The story has been told in pieces since then, and the telling is still incomplete, and the telling belongs most importantly to the people for whom it is not history but heritage.<\/p>\n
The Nez Perce Tribe exists.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their treaty rights exist.<\/p>\n
Their relationship to the land of Idaho and Oregon and Washington and Montana exists, complicated and contested and ongoing.<\/p>\n
White Bird escaped Bear Paw forty miles from the border.<\/p>\n
He was not wrong to try.<\/p>\n
The Promise The Headline Made<\/p>\n
The headline promises a chief who refused to surrender forty miles from Canada, then slipped past the army and escaped.<\/p>\n
That promise has been honored in the preceding pages.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It happened.<\/p>\n
White Bird refused the terms offered on October 5, 1877.<\/p>\n
He escaped the Bear Paw area.<\/p>\n
He reached Canada.<\/p>\n
The people who followed him in the subsequent days brought the total of those who reached Canada to approximately 300.<\/p>\n
The real story, as promised, is deeper than the headline.<\/p>\n
It is the story of a hundred days of movement across a thousand miles, of a council of leaders trying to navigate an impossible situation, of families trying to stay alive while an army tried to stop them, of decisions made in extremity that cannot be judged from comfort.<\/p>\n
It is the story of two men \u2014 Joseph and White Bird \u2014 who looked at the same impossible situation on October 5, 1877, and reached different conclusions, and of why both of them were right about something important.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is the story of people who kept moving when moving was the only choice, and who refused to disappear when disappearance was what was being demanded of them.<\/p>\n
And it is the story that is still unfinished \u2014 because the nim\u00edipuu are still here, still maintaining their relationship to their history and their land, still traveling the route of the 1877 flight in ceremonial remembrance, still working through the courts and the councils and the negotiations that are the contemporary form of the same long argument.<\/p>\n
White Bird escaped to Canada forty miles from the border.<\/p>\n
The border exists.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu exist.<\/p>\n
The story continues.<\/p>\n
The Lolo Trail And What It Demanded<\/p>\n
When the non-treaty bands made the decision to cross into Montana after White Bird Canyon, the route they chose was the Lolo Trail \u2014 a path through the Bitterroot Mountains that the nim\u00edipuu had used for generations.<\/p>\n
This path was not a road or a track in any Euro-American sense.<\/p>\n
It was a route through high, rugged, heavily timbered mountain country that the nim\u00edipuu knew from long experience and that few non-nim\u00edipuu had traveled.<\/p>\n
Lewis and Clark had crossed it in 1805, guided by nim\u00edipuu people, and had found it among the most grueling portions of their entire journey.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For the nim\u00edipuu in late June and early July 1877, the Lolo Trail served two purposes.<\/p>\n
It was a path through the mountains, relatively secure from immediate army pursuit because the terrain was difficult to move through with a large military column and because the army initially did not know exactly which route the nim\u00edipuu had taken.<\/p>\n
And it was a passage into Montana, which the nim\u00edipuu still believed might offer alternatives to continued conflict.<\/p>\n
Howard’s column attempted to follow, but the army’s pace through the Lolo Trail was slower than the nim\u00edipuu’s.<\/p>\n
The army had wagons and supply trains and soldiers who were not experienced mountain travelers; the nim\u00edipuu had horses, children, and the knowledge of generations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The passage through the Lolo Trail was not easy for the nim\u00edipuu either.<\/p>\n
The trail demanded sustained physical effort over many days.<\/p>\n
People who were already carrying the stress of the crisis in Idaho, who had been moving since the violence of early June, who were managing the full range of human needs for hundreds of people \u2014 these people crossed one of the more difficult mountain routes in North America while ahead of an army.<\/p>\n
When they emerged on the Montana side, they encountered the military attempt to block them \u2014 the log barrier that became known as Fort Fizzle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The army garrison was small, the nim\u00edipuu’s ability to maneuver around obstacles was already demonstrated, and the Montana settlers who lined the road to watch were content to let the nim\u00edipuu pass through if the nim\u00edipuu gave assurances of peaceful behavior.<\/p>\n
The Bitterroot Valley portion of the journey was, in retrospect, one of the calmer periods of the flight.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu paid for goods in the valley’s small settlements, maintained their commitments not to harm the local population, and moved through without major incident.<\/p>\n
It was Looking Glass’s confidence, after this relatively quiet passage, that contributed to the decision to slow down at Big Hole.<\/p>\n
The army had been outrun.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The immediate crisis seemed to be behind them.<\/p>\n
People and horses needed rest.<\/p>\n
The army had not given up.<\/p>\n
The People Who Did Not Go: Treaty-Band nim\u00edipuu And The Weight Of Division<\/p>\n
One aspect of the 1877 crisis that tends to be understated in popular accounts is the position of the treaty-band nim\u00edipuu \u2014 the people from bands that had signed the 1863 treaty and were living on the Lapwai Reservation.<\/p>\n
These were not neutral parties.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
They had kinship ties to the people in the non-treaty bands.<\/p>\n
They watched the 1877 events with complicated feelings: they had their own resentments about the way the reservation system worked, their own grief at the situation of their relatives, and their own fear that the conflict would harm them even though they had done nothing to cause it.<\/p>\n
Some treaty-band nim\u00edipuu did actively assist the army during the 1877 campaign \u2014 scouting, interpreting, and eventually serving as the intermediaries who brought the surrender terms to White Bird and Joseph at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
This assistance was not uniformly motivated by enthusiasm for army goals; some participated because they calculated that demonstrating loyalty to American authority was the best way to protect what the treaty bands had.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Others participated out of genuine alignment with reservation policies.<\/p>\n
The two men who came into the Bear Paw camp on October 5 \u2014 Captain John and Old George \u2014 were treaty-band nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
They had followed Howard’s column.<\/p>\n
When they entered the camp and delivered the army’s assurances, they were speaking to their own people in their own language, trying to end a conflict that they had not chosen.<\/p>\n
Their role has sometimes been portrayed as betrayal in simplified accounts.<\/p>\n
The more accurate picture is of people making their own difficult calculations in a situation that offered no good options for anyone who was nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
White Bird, who reportedly expressed his refusal to surrender partly through contempt for the army’s assurances and partly through his distrust of the promises being delivered, was not simply refusing the army.<\/p>\n
He was refusing a message delivered by nim\u00edipuu men who had made different choices than he had.<\/p>\n
The internal divisions of 1877 \u2014 between treaty and non-treaty bands, between those who saw accommodation as survival and those who saw accommodation as surrender, between those who stayed and those who fled \u2014 were not resolved at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
They persisted into the reservation period, into the twentieth century, and in some form into the present in the complex internal politics of the tribe.<\/p>\n
The Other Leader: Looking Glass’s Arc<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Looking Glass’s story within the 1877 flight is one of the most painful subplots of the whole episode, and it directly shapes the events at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass had initially tried to stay out of the conflict entirely.<\/p>\n
His Alpowai band was camped peacefully on the Clearwater when, in early July 1877, the army attacked his camp.<\/p>\n
The attack was based on the premise that Looking Glass might provide support or warriors to the non-treaty bands who were then in conflict with the army.<\/p>\n
There was no evidence of imminent threat from Looking Glass’s camp.<\/p>\n
The attack destroyed a peaceful camp, killed some people, and drove Looking Glass and his band into the arms of the people who were already fleeing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Looking Glass had no choice now: he was a target, and the only option was to join the flight.<\/p>\n
Once he joined, Looking Glass quickly became the primary military and logistical leader of the march.<\/p>\n
He was older and more experienced than most of the other leaders, and he had a confident, authoritative manner that other leaders were willing to follow.<\/p>\n
But his confidence in his own strategic judgment, which had served the group well through much of the flight, also contributed to his most consequential error: the decision to rest at Big Hole.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass believed they had outrun the army.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was wrong.<\/p>\n
After Big Hole, Looking Glass’s authority was challenged.<\/p>\n
Some accounts indicate that Poker Joe \u2014 a mixed-heritage leader who had joined the flight during the Bitterroot passage \u2014 took over as march leader for a period, with a more aggressive insistence on speed.<\/p>\n
Looking Glass resumed primary leadership as the flight continued into September.<\/p>\n
And at Bear Paw, on October 4, he was watching the northern approaches, hopeful that Lakota riders from Sitting Bull’s camp might arrive to offer help or reinforcements.<\/p>\n
He was killed at that watching post.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Looking Glass had been drawn into the conflict by an attack he did not seek.<\/p>\n
He led the march as well as anyone in his position could have.<\/p>\n
He died forty miles from Canada, watching for help that never came.<\/p>\n
His death, and the deaths of Ollokot and Toohoolhoolzote in the fighting, eliminated the warrior leadership of the nim\u00edipuu at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
The men who remained to make decisions on October 5 were Joseph \u2014 whose primary role had always been that of a peace negotiator and civil leader \u2014 and White Bird.<\/p>\n
General Howard’s Role: The Pursuing Column<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Oliver Otis Howard, the general commanding the Department of the Columbia, was the officer responsible for the 1877 conflict from the army’s perspective.<\/p>\n
Howard is a complicated historical figure.<\/p>\n
He had a reputation as a man of genuine moral seriousness \u2014 he had been an advocate for the rights of Black Americans during Reconstruction, and he was one of the founders of Howard University, the historically Black institution in Washington.<\/p>\n
His critics, however, including some of his own officers, found him rigid, moralistic, and poor at the kind of flexible tactical decision-making that pursuit of the nim\u00edipuu required.<\/p>\n
Howard’s initial approach to the 1877 crisis had been forceful: the thirty-day deadline, the arrest of Toohoolhoolzote, the uncompromising insistence on reservation confinement.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When the violence broke out and the nim\u00edipuu flight began, Howard’s column was consistently behind the nim\u00edipuu \u2014 outmarched, outmaneuvered, and often frustrated by the terrain and by his own supply problems.<\/p>\n
The engagement that Howard could claim some credit for \u2014 in terms of forcing the nim\u00edipuu into the specific position where Miles could intercept them \u2014 was the sustained pressure of the pursuit over months.<\/p>\n
Howard’s column kept the nim\u00edipuu from settling anywhere or seeking too long a rest, which contributed to the exhaustion that was a significant factor at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
But it was Miles’s rapid march that actually produced the Bear Paw interception.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When Howard arrived at Bear Paw on October 4, after the siege was already underway, he had to be resupplied and was with only a small retinue.<\/p>\n
His army had been sent home.<\/p>\n
Howard’s role at the actual surrender was largely ceremonial \u2014 he arrived after the hard work was done, accepted what Miles had accomplished, and received part of the credit in official accounts.<\/p>\n
His relationship with the nim\u00edipuu leaders was never repaired.<\/p>\n
Joseph, in the years of exile, made a point of addressing his petitions to whoever was in a position to grant them \u2014 not to Howard specifically, but to the civilian authorities above the military.<\/p>\n
White Bird, from Canada, would not have needed to address Howard at all.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was outside Howard’s jurisdiction, across the Medicine Line, among the Lakota.<\/p>\n
Colonel Miles And What He Promised<\/p>\n
Nelson Miles was a more tactically effective officer than Howard \u2014 younger, more aggressive, willing to push his command hard across difficult terrain.<\/p>\n
His rapid march from Tongue River to Bear Paw demonstrated real military capability.<\/p>\n
He was also capable of the kind of promise-making at Bear Paw that contributed to the moral complexity of the surrender.<\/p>\n
Miles apparently believed that the assurances he gave Joseph \u2014 that the people would be returned to Idaho \u2014 were within his power to deliver.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was subsequently frustrated when the government overrode those assurances and sent the nim\u00edipuu first to Fort Leavenworth and then to Indian Territory.<\/p>\n
This does not entirely exculpate Miles.<\/p>\n
The pattern of army officers making promises that civilian authorities then overrode was not unknown in the Indian wars period, and an experienced officer might have known better than to make such specific promises without prior authorization.<\/p>\n
Miles was ambitious \u2014 he sought credit for the capture of Joseph as a military accomplishment \u2014 and the assurances he gave may have been as much about securing the surrender quickly as about genuine intent to honor the terms.<\/p>\n
What Miles promised and what happened next became one of the specific grievances that Joseph raised in the years of advocacy that followed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joseph’s accounts of what he had been promised \u2014 and what he received instead \u2014 were among the most powerful arguments in his public advocacy for his people’s right to return home.<\/p>\n
White Bird, who had decided not to trust the promises, did not have to navigate the betrayal of those promises directly.<\/p>\n
His exile in Canada was its own kind of punishment, but it was not the specific pain of being promised return to Idaho and receiving Fort Leavenworth instead.<\/p>\n
The Buffalo And Why Canada Was Not Safety<\/p>\n
The Lakota under Sitting Bull had crossed into Canada after the Little Bighorn in 1876, and by October 1877 \u2014 when the nim\u00edipuu refugees arrived \u2014 they had been in the Wood Mountain area of present-day Saskatchewan for about a year.<\/p>\n
The sanctuary they had found was real in its protection from the American army.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But it was not a sustainable permanent settlement.<\/p>\n
The buffalo herds that had supported Plains peoples’ economies for generations were collapsing rapidly across the 1870s and 1880s.<\/p>\n
Commercial American buffalo hunters had already severely reduced the southern herd; the northern herd, which the Lakota and their neighbors depended on in Canada, was following the same trajectory.<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu refugees who arrived in Canada were plateau people, not plains people.<\/p>\n
They knew how to hunt buffalo, but the horse-based buffalo economy of the plains was not their primary subsistence tradition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They came from a world of salmon rivers and camas prairies, and the Saskatchewan plains offered neither.<\/p>\n
The Lakota were generous hosts within their capacity, but Sitting Bull’s community was not in a position to easily absorb 300 additional refugees.<\/p>\n
Resources were already under pressure.<\/p>\n
The Mounted Police were watching.<\/p>\n
The Canadian government was maintaining a position of calculated distance: not forcibly removing the refugees, but not providing assistance that would encourage permanent settlement.<\/p>\n
Sitting Bull himself returned to the United States and surrendered in 1881, after the deterioration of conditions in Canada made the exile untenable.<\/p>\n
Some of his followers went with him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nim\u00edipuu in Canada were dispersing even before Sitting Bull’s surrender.<\/p>\n
Some returned to the United States individually or in small groups, quietly, hoping to slip back to reservation life without being identified as having been in the flight.<\/p>\n
Some stayed in Canada longer.<\/p>\n
White Bird, according to the available accounts, remained in Canada until his death around 1882.<\/p>\n
The trajectory was one of gradual dissolution rather than continued community cohesion.<\/p>\n
The flight had brought approximately 300 people to Canada, but Canada could not hold them together as a community.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Individual families and groups made individual decisions over the following years about whether to return, when to return, and what they would face when they did.<\/p>\n
The Documented Return Of Some Refugees<\/p>\n
Beginning in 1878, some nim\u00edipuu from Canada began crossing back into the United States, trying to reach Lapwai or family members who had surrendered at Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
The NPS “Nez Perce Summer, 1877” online history describes the early returnees: small parties, some as few as four or five people, crossing the border quietly and trying to reach the reservation.<\/p>\n
Some were successful.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Others were caught.<\/p>\n
The army had instructed Assiniboine and Gros Ventre warriors to seek out and kill returning nim\u00edipuu.<\/p>\n
Some returning refugees were killed in these encounters.<\/p>\n
The border offered protection from the American army on one side; crossing it to try to go home exposed the returnees to a different set of dangers.<\/p>\n
This aspect of the aftermath is less often told than either the surrender speech or the exile, but it was the lived reality of many nim\u00edipuu for years after Bear Paw.<\/p>\n
The choice was not between safety and exile.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was between different kinds of danger, different kinds of uncertainty, different kinds of loss.<\/p>\n
The people who had surrendered at Bear Paw were in Fort Leavenworth through the winter of 1877-1878, then in Indian Territory.<\/p>\n
The people who had escaped to Canada were dispersed among the Lakota, trying to survive on declining game in an unfamiliar landscape.<\/p>\n
And the people who tried to return quietly from Canada were sometimes killed on the way.<\/p>\n
There was no good option.<\/p>\n
There had not been one since June 1877.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 126 Days: A Reckoning<\/p>\n
The 1877 flight lasted approximately 126 days, from the outbreak of violence in Idaho in June to the Bear Paw surrender in October.<\/p>\n
The distance traveled was approximately 1,170 miles.<\/p>\n
These numbers convey something about the scale of what happened.<\/p>\n
They do not convey what it felt like to be in it.<\/p>\n
One hundred and twenty-six days is four months and a few days.<\/p>\n
It is the length of a full baseball season, longer than a standard school semester.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In those 126 days, the nim\u00edipuu who began the flight:<\/p>\n