The next morning, however, Findley and McNall rode back to the second camp alone and watched from a distance. After about 90 minutes a Nez Perce approached from the woods, and the two white men rode down to meet him. By the time they reached the camp, three Nez Perce were there. One of them was Wilhautyah, a close friend of Chief Joseph of the Wallowa Nez Perce band. Exactly what happened next is subject to debate.

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Findley said he dismounted and grabbed a Nez Perce weapon leaning against a tree, one of three hunting rifles in the Indian camp. “[I] told the Indians I believed they had stolen and we wanted them to go to the settlement until we had an understanding about the matter. They did not consent to go.”

According to Findley he then put the Nez Perce rifle beside one that had been lying on the ground, and McNall laid a third rifle that had been near him beside the others. With the Indians unarmed, Findley and McNall again tried to persuade them to go to the settlement. The Nez Perce again refused, an argument erupted, and Wilhautyah and McNall ended up wrestling for McNall’s rifle.

“The next thing I knew,” Findley said, “McNall called on me to shoot.” Then McNall’s rifle fired. “About the time of the report,” Findley said, “I cocked my gun and held it ready, waiting to see the result of the scuffle over the gun of McNall. Resolved not to shoot until I saw our lives were in danger.” When Findley fired, it seemed to surprise him. “I had not decided to shoot when I heard the report of my gun,” he said. “I was not conscious of pulling the trigger.”

When recounting the story years later, Findley’s son, H.R. Findley, described a different ending, saying that the fight started when Wilhautyah grabbed McNall’s rifle, and the struggle lasted until a desperate McNall began cursing Findley, demanding that he shoot. “It was then that [my father] took careful aim and killed Wilhautyah,” the younger Findley said. Whether the killing was accidental or deliberate, the two white men quickly left the scene. When word of the incident spread settlers feared Nez Perce retaliation. Some barricaded themselves in McNall’s blockhouse-like cabin.

The next morning, the settlers persuaded McNall to ride to the county seat of Union and report the incident to County Judge E.C. Brainard. Unsure of how to handle the situation, Brainard wrote a letter to Colonel Elmer Otis, the commander of Fort Walla Walla. “More trouble in the Willowa,” Brainard wrote, “one Finley and McNall accuse the Indians of stealing horses, and have managed to kill one of Joseph’s band. The settlers are sufficiently alarmed to mass in the valley.”

To make matters worse, three days after the killing Findley found his missing horses grazing near his home. “Blowing Wind was an honest man,” said Peopeo Tholekt of the Looking Glass band of Nez Perce, “and the horses being found proved him innocent.”

His killers, however, were still unpunished, and as Wallowa settlers prepared to defend themselves, John Monteith, the Indian agent at the Lapwai Reservation, met with Joseph to hear the Nez Perce version of the story. Afterwards, Monteith wrote to General Oliver Otis Howard, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of the Columbia, which had jurisdiction over the Wallowa country. Monteith’s letter called the killing “willful, deliberate murder.” Yet he advised Joseph to let white law determine justice. “I told him to keep his people quiet and all would end well.”

Howard, a veteran officer who had lost his right arm in the Civil War, was a religious man who gained the nickname “Old Prayer Book” for his distribution of tracts and Bibles to his troops during the war. He sympathized with the Nez Perce cause and sent Major Henry Clay Wood, his assistant adjutant general, to Lapwai. As a lawyer, Wood had studied the Nez Perce case and concluded that “The nontreaty Nez Perce cannot in law be regarded as bound by the treaty of 1863.” He was also critical of President Grant’s revocation of the 1873 Executive Order, saying, “If not a crime, it was a blunder.”

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