Wallowa Tribe Research Paper

“From across a freezing Montana battlefield on October 5, 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce rode into the camp of U.S. Army Colonel Nelson Miles and surrendered his rifle. ‘Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired,’ he said. ‘My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ With those words he ended the war between 750 Nez Perce–500 of them women, children, and elderly–and 2,000 soldiers, a four-month battle that had ranged across 1,200 miles. “I am tired of fighting,” he told Miles. “Our chiefs are killed. The old men are all dead. He who led the young men [my brother] is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to

Prior to the 1800s, the Nez Perce people had lived on ancestral lands surrounding Wallowa Lake for many generations. With a population in 1805 of about 12,000, they were the largest tribe on the Columbia River Plateau. They had 100 permanent villages and 300 related camps and villages and occupied ancestral lands of 17 million acres. This land covered parts of present day Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and surrounded the Snake, Salmon, Clearwater, and Columbia Rivers, and stretched from the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana to the Blue Mountains in Oregon and Washington. In 1855, the Treaty of Walla Walla was signed, giving up all but 7.5 million acres of the Nez Perce ancestral lands for the sum of $200,000. Serious problems occurred in 1860 when gold was found in Canal Gulch by ten white miners who invaded the Nez Perce reservation without permission from the tribe or the Indian agent, as required by the treaty. White settlers interest in Nez Perce land greatly increased from this point onward, causing much strife and eventually causing the