The Nez Perce and their Sahaptian kin once lived in a vast but loosely described territory stretching from the Bitterroot Mountains in the east to the desert of what is now Washington and Oregon in the west. In 1805 the tribe welcomed the Lewis and Clark expedition, who remarked on their intelligence, hospitality, and the natural abundance of their land. A peaceful coexistence with the few white explorers, trappers, and missionaries abruptly ended in 1860 when the discovery of gold precipitated a rush of thousands to north central Idaho. Somewhat crazed by the dreams of instant wealth, the adventurers took little heed that they were invading the Indians' land and breaking U.S. treaties. Among the accounts is a rare Nez Perce description by Sam Lott (Many Wounds) of the 1862 murder of two Nez Perce by white miners. Dennis Baird and his colleagues scoured the country and collected the existing firsthand accounts of that time of very rapid change. White officials, officers, missionaries, and journalists were lucid, compassionate, and surprisingly in favor of the Nez Perce. However, the prevailing national attitude toward Indians supported the wholesale "taking" of Indian land, which led to the disastrous Nez Perce Treaty of 1863 and greatly downsized their reservation.

In this wrenching sequel to Divided We Fall, Danny and friends fight to defend Idaho against a Federal takeover and the ravages of a Burning Nation. At the end of Divided We Fall, Danny Wright's beloved Idaho had been invaded by the federal government, their electricity shut off, their rights suspended. Danny goes into hiding with his friends in order to remain free. But after the state declares itself a Republic, Idaho rises to fight in a second American Civil War, and Danny is right in the center of the action, running guerrilla missions with his fellow soldiers to break the Federal occupation. Yet what at first seems like a straightforward battle against governmental repression quickly grows more complicated, as more states secede, more people die, and Danny discovers the true nature of some of his new allies. Chilling, powerful, and all too plausible, Burning Nation further establishes Trent Reedy as a provocative new voice in YA fiction.

Following the Nez Perce War of 1877, federal representatives promised the Nimiipuu who surrendered with Chief Joseph repatriation to their Pacific Northwest homes. Instead, they were driven into exile. This book tells the story of the Nimiipuu captivity and deportation and offers an in-depth analysis of the resistant Nez Perce, Cayuse, and Palus bands during their incarceration. Focusing on the tribes’ eight years in exile, J. Diane Pearson describes their arduous forced journey from Montana to the Ponca Agency in Indian Territory. She depicts their everyday experiences in a captivity marked by grueling poverty and disease to weave a compelling story of tragedy and heroism. The resistance of the survivors is a never-before-told story reconstructed through new sources and oral histories. Pearson tells how the Nimiipuu advocated for their aboriginal and civil rights and for the return to their Wallowa Valley homelands. And she describes how they turned their prison odyssey into a time of renewal, learning to adapt to federal strategies in order to force authorities to heed their voices, and finally negotiating their release in 1885. Impeccably researched, with insights into the prisoners’ daily lives, The Nez Perces in the Indian Territory is the only comprehensive record of this phase of Nez Perce history.

In 1889 the U.S. government sent the anthropologist Alice Fletcher to Idaho to allot the Nez Perce Reservation. She was accompanied by E. Jane Gay, who served as cook, housekeeper, photographer, and general factotum. In this collection of her letters, Gay describes in sprightly fashion their encounters with feuding agents, hostile white squatters, and a Nez Perce tribe divided over and puzzled by this latest government program.

Organized both chronologically and thematically, Encounters with the People is an edited, annotated compilation of unique primary sources related to Nez Perce history--Native American oral histories, diary excerpts, military reports, maps, and more. Generous elders shared their collective memory of carefully guarded stories passed down through multiple generations. One described the level of attentiveness required to preserve their oral history as “so still to listen that you could hear a bird take a drink of water on the other side of the mountain.” The work begins with early Nimiipuu/Euro-American contact and extends to the period immediately after the Treaty of 1855 held at Walla Walla. The editors scoured archives, federal document repositories, and state and local historical museums in search of little-known documents related to regional cultural and environmental history. Most of the selected material is published for the first time or is found only in obscure sources. Complete documents are included wherever possible, and any excisions carefully noted. Part of the Voices from Nez Perce Country series, Encounters with the People includes a thorough, up-to-date, annotated bibliography. Those interested in the Nez Perce, Native American Studies, Lewis and Clark, early missionary work, and Inland Northwest settlement will find it an essential reference work. Recipient of a 2016 CHOICE Academic Book of the Year, the 2016 Western History Association Dwight L. Smith Award, and a 2015 Idaho Book Award Honorable Mention, from the Idaho Library Association.

This newest volume in Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments series offers an unforgettable portrait of the Nez Perce War of 1877, the last great Indian conflict in American history. It was, as Elliott West shows, a tale of courage and ingenuity, of desperate struggle and shattered hope, of short-sighted government action and a doomed flight to freedom. To tell the story, West begins with the early history of the Nez Perce and their years of friendly relations with white settlers. In an initial treaty, the Nez Perce were promised a large part of their ancestral homeland, but the discovery of gold led to a stampede of settlement within the Nez Perce land. Numerous injustices at the hands of the US government combined with the settlers' invasion to provoke this most accomodating of tribes to war. West offers a riveting account of what came next: the harrowing flight of 800 Nez Perce, including many women, children and elderly, across 1500 miles of mountainous and difficult terrain. He gives a full reckoning of the campaigns and battles--and the unexpected turns, brilliant stratagems, and grand heroism that occurred along the way. And he brings to life the complex characters from both sides of the conflict, including cavalrymen, officers, politicians, and--at the center of it all--the Nez Perce themselves (the Nimiipuu, "true people"). The book sheds light on the war's legacy, including the near sainthood that was bestowed upon Chief Joseph, whose speech of surrender, "I will fight no more forever," became as celebrated as the Gettysburg Address. Based on a rich cache of historical documents, from government and military records to contemporary interviews and newspaper reports, The Last Indian War offers a searing portrait of a moment when the American identity--who was and who was not a citizen--was being forged.

This is the story of the so-called Inland Empire of teh Northwest, that rugged and majestic region bounded east and west by the Cascades and the Rockies, from the time of the great exploration of Lewis and Clark to the tragic defeat of Chief Joseph in 1877. Explorers, fur traders, miner, settlers, missionaries, ranchers and above all a unique succession of Indian chiefs and their tribespeople bring into focus one of the permanently instructive chapters in the history of the American West.