The Battle of Canyon Creek was a military engagement in Montana Territory between the Nez Perce Indians and the United States Army's 7th Cavalry. The battle was part of the larger Indian Wars of the latter 19th century and the immediate Nez Perce War. It took place on September 13, 1877, west of present-day Billings in Yellowstone County, in the canyons and benches around Canyon Creek.
In June 1877, several bands of the Nez Perce, resisting relocation from their native lands on the Wallowa River in northeast Oregon to a reservation in north-central Idaho Territory on the Clearwater River, attempted to escape to the east through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming territories, over the Rocky Mountains into the Great Plains. By September, the Nez Perce had traveled nearly one thousand miles (1,600 km) and fought several battles in which they defeated or held off the U.S. Army forces pursuing them. The Nez Perce had the mistaken notion that after crossing the next mountain range or defeating the latest army sent to oppose them they would find a peaceful new home.
After passing through Yellowstone National Park, the Nez Perce eluded the forces of Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis and followed the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River north out of Wyoming into Montana. Brigadier General Oliver Howard, who had chased the Nez Perce unsuccessfully for three months, ordered Sturgis to continue the pursuit. Sturgis had 360 men in six cavalry companies, divided into two battalions, one commanded by Major Lewis Merrill and the second by Captain Frederick Benteen. Howard reinforced Sturgis's 360 men with 50 additional cavalrymen, two mountain howitzers, twenty-five white scouts, and a few Bannock and Crow scouts. Howard and his soldiers, whose horses were worn out, would rest and follow a couple of days behind Sturgis.
The route of the Nez Perce had been predicated on the belief, especially by Looking Glass, that they would find asylum and safety among their friends, the Crow who lived near the Yellowstone River. Looking Glass met with representatives of both bands of the Crow on the Clark's Fork. The Crow, realizing that helping the Nez Perce would lead to retaliation on them by the U.S. army, rejected the appeal of the Nez Perce for help. Moreover, a few Crow warriors would join the army as scouts with an eye on capturing the large Nez Perce horse herd. At this point, the Nez Perce realized that their one hope for safety was to join the Sioux leader Sitting Bull in Canada, 250 miles (400 km) to their north.
In their journey down the Clark's Fork, the Nez Perce killed several prospectors and ranchers.
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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