The Nez Perce War was an armed conflict that erupted in 1877 when several bands of the Nez Perce tribe, known as "non-treaty Indians," refused to abandon their ancestral lands in the Pacific Northwest and relocate to an Indian reservation in Idaho Territory. This resistance was rooted in the violation of the 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla, which had guaranteed the tribe 7.5 million acres of their ancestral lands and the right to hunt and fish on lands ceded to the U.S. government. The initial armed engagements in June precipitated a larger conflict between the Nez Perce and their allies—including a small band of the Palouse tribe led by Red Echo and Bald Head—against the United States Army.
Following the first engagements in June, the Nez Perce undertook an arduous trek northward in an attempt to seek assistance. Their initial strategy was to appeal to the Crow tribe for aid; however, the Crows refused to provide support. Undeterred, the Nez Perce then pursued sanctuary with the Lakota led by Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in May 1877 to escape capture following the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. Throughout this journey, the Nez Perce were pursued by elements of the U.S. Army, engaging in a series of battles and skirmishes.
The conflict lasted from June through October 1877, representing a significant moment in the struggle between Native American tribes and federal authority during the Indian Wars period. The war underscored the tensions arising from broken treaty obligations and the U.S. government's policy of forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral territories.
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.
18 settlers killed
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