The Battle of Cottonwood was a series of engagements July 3–5, 1877, in the Nez Perce War between the Native American Nez Perce people, and U.S. Army soldiers and civilian volunteers. Near Cottonwood, Idaho Territory, the Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, brushed aside the soldiers and continued their 1,170 miles (1,880 km) fighting retreat to cross the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to reach safety in Canada.
After their victory at the Battle of White Bird Canyon on June 17, the Nez Perce crossed the Salmon River to escape General O. O. Howard, who was advancing on them with 400 soldiers. With difficulty Howard crossed the river to confront the Indians, but the outnumbered Nez Perce then recrossed the Salmon, stranding the less mobile U.S. soldiers for several days on the opposite side of the river.
The Nez Perce numbered about 600, of whom 150 were warriors. With them were more than 2,000 livestock, mostly horses. With the guns and ammunition the Nez Perce had captured at White Bird Canyon, they were fairly well-armed. Their objective in the Battle of Cottonwood was "to engage the whites only long enough allow the safe passage of their families."
After recrossing the Salmon and leaving Howard behind, the Nez Perce headed east across the Camas Prairie, having made the decision to flee into the Bitterroot Mountains. In their path, stationed at Norton's Ranch (future Cottonwood) was Captain Stephen Whipple with 65 soldiers and several civilian volunteers. On July 3, two of Whipple's civilian scouts stumbled across the Nez Perce horse herd. The Nez Perce killed one man, but the other escaped and reported that the Nez Perce were nearby. Whipple sent out Lieutenant Sevier Rains with ten soldiers and two civilians to investigate. The Nez Perce ambushed the Rains group and killed all thirteen.
Whipple dug in around Norton's ranch with his remaining soldiers. He was reinforced on July 4 by Captain David Perry with twenty soldiers and six civilian volunteers. Perry, who had led the soldiers in the White Bird Canyon battle two weeks earlier took command of the soldiers and volunteers, now numbering about 85. For the remainder of the day, the soldiers stayed in their rifle pits while the Nez Perce sniped at them from long distance.
The next day, July 5, the Nez Perce undertook to bypass the entrenched soldiers, detailing fourteen young men to keep the soldiers pinned down in the rifle pits. Screened by warriors, the remainder of the Nez Perce and their livestock passed by a mile away heading eastward. The soldiers did not contest their passage. A group of seventeen civilian volunteers appeared near Cottonwood at this time. They attempted to reach the soldiers by breaking through the Nez Perce screen, but they had to take up a defensive position on a hilltop about one and 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Cottonwood. Three of the volunteers were killed and two wounded. One elderly Nez Perce warrior was killed – the first to die in the war – and one wounded. Although Captain Perry could see from his fortifications the plight of the volunteers he declined to send help until the Nez Perce had withdrawn.
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.
This page covers Cottonwood Skirmish No. 1 (Rains Fight). A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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