Tensions between Nez Perce and white settlers…

Tensions between Nez Perce and white settlers rise in 1876 and 1877.

General Oliver Howard calls a council in May 1877 and orders the non-treaty bands to move to the reservation, setting an impossible deadline of thirty days.

Howard humiliates the Nez Perce by jailing their old leader, Toohoolhoolzote, who speaks against moving to the reservation.

The other Nez Perce leaders then agree to the move, including Chief Joseph, who considers military resistance to be futile and reports as ordered to Fort Lapwai, Idaho.

The Nez Perce had been coerced by the United States federal government at the Walla Walla Council in 1855 into giving up their ancestral lands and moving to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon Territory with the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla tribes.

The tribes involved were so bitterly opposed to the terms of the plan that Isaac I. Stevens, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Territory of Washington, and Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian affairs for Oregon Territory, signed the Nez Perce Treaty in 1855, which had granted the Nez Perce the right to remain in a large portion of their own lands in Idaho, Washington and Oregon Territories, in exchange for relinquishing almost five and a half million acres of their approximately thirteen million acre homeland to the U.S. government for a nominal sum, with the caveat that they be able to hunt, fish and pasture their horses etc. on unoccupied areas of their former land—the same rights to use public lands as Anglo-American citizens of the territories.

The newly established Nez Perce Indian reservation had covered seven and a half million acres in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington Territories.

Under the terms of the treaty, no white settlers were to be allowed on the reservation without the permission of the Nez Perce.

However, in 1860 gold had been discovered and  five thousand gold-seekers had rushed onto the reservation, illegally founding the city of Lewiston, Idaho as a supply depot on Nez Perce land.

Ranchers and farmers had followed the miners and the U.S. government had failed to keep settlers out of native lands.

The Nez Perce are incensed at the failure of the US government to uphold the treaties, and at settlers who squat on their land and plow up their camas prairies, which they depend on for subsistence.

In 1863, a group of Nez Perce had again been coerced into signing away part of their reservation to the United States, this time almost all of it, leaving only seven hundred and fifty thousand acres in Idaho Territory.

Under the terms of the treaty, all Nez Perce were to move onto the new, and much smaller, reservation.

A large number of Nez Perce, however, had not accepted the validity of the treaty, refused to move to the reservation, and remained on their traditional lands.

The Nez Perce who had approved the treaty are mostly Christian; the opponents mostly follow the traditional religion.

The “non-treaty” Nez Perce include the band of Chief Joseph who live in the Wallowa valley in Oregon.

Disputes there with white farmers and ranchers have led to murders of several Nez Perce, and the murderers have never been prosecuted.