The Battle of Camas Creek, August 20, 1877, was a raid by the Nez Perce people on a United States Army encampment in Idaho Territory and a subsequent battle during the Nez Perce War. The Nez Perce defeated three companies of U.S. cavalry and continued their fighting retreat to escape the army.
After sustaining heavy casualties at the Battle of the Big Hole on August 9–10, the Nez Perce proceeded southward though Montana Territory, crossed into Idaho Territory again at Bannock Pass, and descended into the valley of the Lemhi River. The Nez Perce were aware that the U.S. Army was in pursuit; to confound them, they took a circuitous route less familiar than their usual direct route to the Montana Great Plains. During this section of their retreat, their guide and the leader of their march was a half-Nez Perce, half-French man of several names, the most common being Poker Joe. The White settlers in the Lemhi Valley had been warned that the Nez Perce might be coming their way and most of them had fled to the town of Lemhi.
The pursuer of the Nez Perce, Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard, did not follow them directly, but rather took a shorter route to the east across southern Montana to intercept them near Yellowstone National Park. Howard had 310 soldiers plus a varying number of civilian volunteers, usually several dozen, and Indian scouts, primarily Bannocks, but also some Nez Perce friendly to the U.S. Howard detached 50 men, including Indian scouts, under Lt. George R. Bacon to rush ahead and guard Red Rock Pass, thus hoping to catch the Nez Perce between his and Bacon's soldiers. Howard was coming under severe criticism for his failure to defeat the Nez Perce during a campaign that had now lasted two months.
The Nez Perce pursued by Howard probably numbered, after their losses at the Big Hole battle, about 700 persons with fewer than 200 warriors.
The death of many Nez Perce women and children at the Big Hole Battle caused a thirst for revenge among the young warriors of the Nez Perce and their leaders were not able to restrain them.
On August 12, the Nez Perce killed five ranchers on Horse Prairie, Montana. On August 13, after crossing into Idaho over Bannock Pass, the Nez Perce encountered a stockade full of White settlers at Junction. Leaders Looking Glass and White Bird met with the settlers and expressed their friendship for the settlers.
Two days later, the Nez Perce on Birch Creek encountered a caravan of eight covered wagons and eight men. The initial contact was friendly, but after the Indians demanded and were served whiskey the situation became ugly and five of the Whites were killed. One White escaped and two Chinese were released. One Nez Perce was killed, apparently in a drunken brawl with another warrior. The leaders poured the remainder of the whiskey on the ground and burned the wagons.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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