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The death of Wilhautyah

When a white settler killed a Nez Perce warrior in 1876, the incident set off a chain of events that led to war.

By Mark Highberger

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. "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. "Our chiefs are dead," Joseph told Miles. "The old men are all dead….The little children are freezing to death."

Joseph would never again live on the land for which he had fought. The American government sent him and the 430 Nez Perce who surrendered with him to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Those who survived the malaria there were later moved to Indian Territory. Eventually some returned to live on the Nez Perce reservation, close to their former home. In 1885 Joseph was exiled to a reservation in Washington Territory, where he died on September 21, 1904.

The origins of the war that caused Joseph and the Nez Perce so much hardship and grief lay in the Wallowa country of northeast Oregon. For generations it had been the Nez Perce homeland, but the arrival of white settlers in the region led to violence. Settlers killed as many as 30 Nez Perce during the 1860s and '70s, yet few of the accused ever stood trial, and those who did were acquitted.

One such fatal confrontation occurred on a summer day the year before Joseph's surrender. Two settlers from the Wallowa Valley rode into a Nez Perce hunting camp searching for missing horses. When they rode out, a Nez Perce warrior named Wilhautyah (Wind Blowing) lay dead, shot by one of the settlers. The recoil from that shot started a chain of events that led to the Nez Perce War.

At the time of Wilhautyah's death, the Nez Perce were embroiled in a struggle to remain on their ancestral homeland. The roots of conflict stretched back to an 1855 treaty that gave the Wallowa country to the Nez Perce and an 1863 treaty that took it away after gold was discovered on Indian land.

Old Joseph, Chief Joseph's father and the leader of the Wallowa band, refused to sign the second treaty. His Nez Perce considered the valley their home, even as homesteaders began building cabins and planting crops there. Other Nez Perce did sign the treaty and agreed to live on the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho Territory. They were known as the treaty Nez Perce.

In 1873 President Ulysses S. Grant issued an Executive Order that divided the valley between homestead sites and an Indian reservation. Two years later, Grant gave into pressure from whites wanting to settle there and revoked the order, reopening the entire valley to settlement and sealing the fate of the Nez Perce. It was only a matter of time before they would be forced from the Wallowa Valley and onto a reservation. Unaware of what lay ahead, Indians and whites lived as reluctant neighbors until the day Alexander B. Findley noticed five of his horses were missing.

According to Union County Circuit Court records, Findley, one of the valley's first settlers, spent several days "thoroughly searching all the range my horses had run on since I had them." When on June 22, 1876, he came across a Nez Perce camp in the northern foothills, he decided his "suspicion that my horses were stolen were confirmed. I immediately returned to get assistance to search for my horses or their trail and try to recover them."

He got help from three men, including Wells McNall, a 21-year-old known as an Indian-hater and troublemaker. Though the men saw no horses when they returned to the camp, Findley remained convinced he had found horse thieves. "We found tracks comparing or corresponding with my horses," he said. He and McNall went on alone, following the tracks to a hunting camp containing a cache of venison. Findley "told Mr. McNall we would return home and get more help."

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