Northern Idaho: The Nez Percé
The first whites to encounter the Nez Percé were the weak, hungry and disease-ridden Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805. Though the Native Americans had the explorers at their mercy, they gave them food and shelter, and cared for their animals until the party was ready to carry on westward.Relations between the Nez Percé (so called by French-Canadian trappers because of their shell-pierced noses) and whites remained excellent for over half a century - until the discovery of gold, and white pressure for space, led the government to persuade some renegade Nez Percé to sign a treaty in 1863, taking away three-quarters of tribal land. As settlers started to move into the hunting grounds of the Wallowa Valley in the early 1870s, the majority of the Nez Percé, under the leadership of Chief Joseph , refused to recognize the agreement. In 1877, after much vacillation, the government decided to enact its terms and gave the tribe thirty days to leave. The Nez Percé asked for more time to round up their livestock and avoid crossing the Snake River at a dangerous time; the general in charge refused.
The ensuing tensions resulted in skirmishes that caused the deaths of a handful of settlers - the first whites ever to be attacked by Nez Percé- and a large army force began to gather to round up the Nez Percé. Chief Joseph then embarked upon the famous Retreat of the Nez Percé . Around 250 warriors (protecting twice as many women, children and old people) outmaneuvered army columns many times their size, launching frequent guerrilla attacks in a series of hair-breadth escapes. After four months and 1700 miles, the Nez Percé were cornered just thirty miles from the relative safety of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph then (reportedly) made his much-quoted speech of surrender:
Hear me my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad.
From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
The Native Americans had been told that they would be put on a reservation in Idaho; instead, they were taken to Oklahoma, where the marshy land caused a malaria epidemic. Chief Joseph died in 1904 on the Colville reservation in Washington, but decades later the Nez Percé were allowed to return to the northwest, where today some 1500 live in a reservation between Lewiston and Grangeville - a minute fraction of their original territory.
The Nez Percé National Historic Park , containing 24 separate sites, is spread over 12,000 square miles of north central Idaho. At the visitor center in Spalding , ten miles east of Lewiston (tel 208/843-2261), the Museum of Nez Percé Culture (daily summer 8am-5.30pm; rest of year 8am-4.30pm; free) is good on arts and crafts but weak on history; the heavily ravined White Bird Battlefield , seventy miles further south on US-95, was where the Native Americans inflicted 34 deaths on the US Army at no cost to themselves, in the first major battle of the retreat. Further exhibits on Nez Percé history can be found in the Wallowa County Museum in Joseph, Oregon.
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