The Battle of the Big Hole was fought in Montana Territory, August 9–10, 1877, between the United States Army and the Nez Perce tribe of Native Americans during the Nez Perce War. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. The Nez Perce withdrew in good order from the battlefield and continued their long fighting retreat that would result in their attempt to reach Canada and asylum.
Located in Beaverhead County, the battle site is between the continental divide at Chief Joseph Pass and the town of Wisdom.
After the Battle of the Clearwater in Idaho Territory on July 11–12, the Nez Perce leaders led their people on an extensive trek to escape the soldiers of Brigadier General Oliver Otis Howard. The Nez Perce crossed into Montana Territory via rugged Lolo Pass, and after a brief confrontation at Fort Fizzle on July 28, they entered the Bitterroot Valley and proceeded southward. Looking Glass seems to have taken over leadership from Chief Joseph; he pledged to the white settlers in the Bitterroot Valley that the Nez Perce would pass through their valley without violence and they did so, even trading and purchasing supplies from white merchants.
Looking Glass persuaded the Nez Perce that Howard was far behind and that the citizens of Montana did not want war with them. Thus, their progress was leisurely and they took few precautions for defense, not sending out scouts or setting pickets to guard their encampments. They left the Bitterroot Valley, crossed a mountain range, and camped in the Big Hole Basin, pausing to replenish their tipi poles from the surrounding forest. The Nez Perce numbered about 750 people in all with about 200 warriors.
Unknown to the Nez Perce, Colonel John Gibbon had left Fort Shaw with 161 officers and men and one howitzer. Following the trail of the Nez Perce he collected 45 civilian volunteers in the Bitterroot Valley. On August 8, a detachment led by Lieutenant James Bradley discovered the Nez Perce camp along the North Fork of the Big Hole River. That night Gibbon marched overland to the Nez Perce camp, reaching it at dawn, leaving his twelve-pound (5.4 kg) howitzer and a pack train to follow behind with a guard of twenty men. He had come to fight: his orders were no prisoners and no negotiations.
Between Gibbon's position and the Nez Perce encampment, which consisted of 89 tipis in a V-shaped pattern, was the waist-deep and willow-lined North Fork of the Big Hole River. Approaching the Nez Perce encampment on foot at dawn, Gibbon's men encountered an old Nez Perce man and killed him. The soldiers crossed the river and rushed into the village and began firing into the tipis where most of the Nez Perce were still sleeping. The Indians were taken by surprise and fled in all directions. Gibbon's men fired indiscriminately at men, women, and children – although some of the women were said to have been armed and shooting back at the soldiers. Lieutenant James H. Bradley, leading Gibbon's left wing, was killed early in the battle. Leaderless, his men did not continue their advance and left the northern part of the village unoccupied, giving a refuge and a rallying point to the Nez Perce.
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 Battle of Big Hole. 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:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.