Trust for the Nez Perce Trail

09/03/2026

Sik’emneewit—The Way of the Horse

Sometimes preservation heroes do more than preserve an architectural gem they preserve an entire culture or tradition.

Before the great war against the Nez Percé brought them to their knees, they were a proud, traditional people living within the bounds of their homeland—the Canadian Rockies, Oregon, Washington, Montana and Idaho. Yet with all of this significant history, the “modern” Nimíipuu were losing touch with their young people and their past. This needed to change.

READ MORE: https://www.truewestmagazine.com/article/sikemneewit-the-way-of-the-horse/

08/26/2026

In June eighteen seventy seven about eight hundred Nez Perce people, most of them women, children and elders, drove their horse herds out of Idaho with the United States Army behind them. Over four months they covered more than eleven hundred miles across four states, and most of us were never taught that it happened.

They are the nimiipuu. A treaty in eighteen sixty three had cut their reservation to a fraction of its size after gold was found on it, and the bands who never signed it stayed home. In the spring of eighteen seventy seven General Oliver Howard gave them about thirty days to abandon the Wallowa Valley or be driven out of it by soldiers.

Joseph was a civil leader, not a war chief. Looking Glass commanded in the field with Ollokot, White Bird and Lean Elk. A newspaper correspondent wrote that they fought as if they had been schooled at West Point. They surrendered in the Bear Paw Mountains on the fifth of October, forty miles short of Canada. General Nelson Miles told them they would be sent home to Idaho. They went to Fort Leavenworth instead, and then to Indian Territory, which they called Eeikish Pah, the hot place, where more than a hundred of them died. They were allowed north again in eighteen eighty five, eight years late, and Joseph was sent to the Colville Reservation in Washington rather than home.

Their descendants live at Lapwai in Idaho and at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Joseph died at Nespelem in nineteen oh four. The Nez Perce own land in the Wallowa Valley again now, and every July they come back to it and dance.

08/24/2026

08/24/2026

Chief Lookingglass PowWow 50th Anniversary, Kamiah, Idaho 😊

08/24/2026

08/24/2026

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Join tribe member and storyteller Whitebull (J.R. Spencer) on a jou...

08/23/2026

“My old friends have come for me! There they are! Do you not see them!”
At daybreak on Aug. 21, 1935, hímiin maqsmáqs, Yellow Wolf, died in Nespelem, Washington, at age 79. The day before, he had told his family he would not see another sunrise.
Yellow Wolf, a nephew of young Joseph, fought in the Flight of 1877. He tells his story in “Yellow Wolf: His Own Story,” first published in 1940 by the Caxton Press of Caldwell, Idaho, with the help of his friend L.V. McWhorter. The book is now in its 11th printing and is the best-selling book at the Spalding Visitor Center in Lapwai.

Yellow Wolf fought in every battle of the Flight. After the ceasefire at Bear Paw, he decided not to quit the fight. McWhorter quotes him as saying, “I did not surrender my r***e.” He wrapped two cartridge belts around his body and covered them with his shirt; he hid his Wi******er r***e in his leggings and simply walked past the soldiers and on toward Canada. Barely a year later, in August 1878, he returned to Idaho and turned himself in to the Army, who exiled him to Indian Territory with the other survivors.
Although he had submitted to the Army, he was still a warrior. He secreted the war club, his kop-luts, in his leggings and kept it with him while he was in “bondage,” as he called his time in Indian Territory.
His kop-luts and Wi******er r***e are on display at the visitor center at Big Hole National Battlefield near Wisdom, Montana.
He is buried in the Nez Perce cemetery in Nespelem.