In June 1877, several bands of the Nez Perce, numbering about 750 men, women, and children, resisted forced relocation from their native lands on the Wallowa River in northeast Oregon to a reservation in west-central Idaho on the Clearwater River. Rather than accept removal, they attempted to escape to the east through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming over the Rocky Mountains into the Great Plains. By late August, after traveling hundreds of miles and engaging in several battles where they defeated or held off pursuing U.S. Army forces, the Nez Perce entered Yellowstone National Park.
The Nez Perce flight through Yellowstone National Park occurred between August 20 and September 7, 1877, during the larger Nez Perce War. As U.S. Army forces pursued the Nez Perce through the park, hostile and sometimes deadly encounters took place between park visitors and the Native Americans. The pursuit by the Army through Yellowstone intensified the pressure on the Nez Perce bands as they traversed the plateau.
The Army's relentless pursuit forced the Nez Perce off the Yellowstone plateau and into forces that had been arrayed to capture or destroy them as they emerged from the mountains of Yellowstone onto the valley of Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River. This maneuvering placed the Nez Perce in an increasingly desperate position, with coordinated military forces waiting to intercept them upon their exit from the park. The Yellowstone passage represented a critical phase in the broader conflict, demonstrating both the determination of the Nez Perce to resist forced relocation and the sustained military campaign to prevent their escape.
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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