Idaho: Lapwai – Nez Perce National Historic Site

🪶 The Nez Perce: A People Who Never Pierced Their Noses

We were heading west through northern Idaho towards Washington State when we spotted the signs for the Nez Perce National Historical Park at Spalding, and honestly, thank goodness we did. It turned out to be one of those unexpected stops that ends up being the highlight of the day — and this is coming from a man who’d rather press on than pull over, so you know it was worth it.

The area is known to the Nez Perce themselves as Lapwai, which translates roughly as “place of the butterflies” — a rather more elegant name than what it got landed with. It was rechristened Spalding after the Reverend Henry Harmon Spalding, a Protestant missionary who arrived here in 1836, along with his wife Eliza, full of evangelical zeal and the unshakeable conviction that the Nez Perce needed saving. Spalding established a mission, introduced the printing press to the Pacific Northwest, and set about converting as many souls as he could manage. Whether the Nez Perce were entirely grateful for the intervention is, shall we say, a matter of historical debate.

Now, the name “Nez Perce” itself is a gift from the French — specifically from the French-Canadian fur trappers who pushed into this part of the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It means “pierced nose” in French, which sounds like a reasonable enough name for a people — except for the rather glaring problem that the Nez Perce never actually pierced their noses. Not as a tradition, anyway. Whether the French trappers simply got the wrong tribe, misidentified someone, or just weren’t paying attention is lost to history, but the name stuck regardless, in the way that embarrassing nicknames tend to do.

The people themselves call themselves the Niimíipuu — often written as Nee-Me-Poo — which translates simply as “the real people” or “we, the people.” It’s a name with a quiet dignity to it, and a good deal more accurate than the French effort.

The Niimíipuu had occupied this region of what is now Idaho, Oregon, and Washington for thousands of years before anyone from Europe showed up to rename things. They were a semi-nomadic people, following the seasons: fishing the rivers for salmon in summer, hunting elk and deer, gathering camas root — a staple food that sustained generations — and trading widely across the region. They were known for their horsemanship, their sophisticated culture, and their generally peaceful disposition towards outsiders. That last quality, sadly, would not serve them especially well in the centuries to come.

The Nez Perce first encountered Americans of European descent in September 1805, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition — officially the Corps of Discovery — stumbled out of the Bitterroot Mountains in an absolutely dreadful state. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to find a route to the Pacific, had just crossed the Rockies in appalling conditions and were reportedly half-starved and in poor health. The Niimíipuu fed them, helped them build canoes, and cared for their horses while they continued west to the Pacific coast. Without that assistance, there’s a reasonable argument that the expedition might not have made it at all. Lewis and Clark returned through Nez Perce territory the following year in 1806, and the tribe assisted them again. It was the beginning of a relationship that was, for several decades, remarkably cordial by the standards of the American frontier.

That cordiality would be tested severely as the 19th century wore on. By the 1850s and 1860s, settlers and gold prospectors were pouring into the region. Gold had been discovered in Nez Perce territory in 1860, and as tends to happen in these situations, the interests of the Niimíipuu rather quickly became secondary to the interests of everyone rushing in to get rich. A treaty in 1863 — which many Nez Perce leaders refused to sign and which became known bitterly as the “Thief Treaty” — reduced the Nez Perce reservation to a fraction of its former size. Lands that had been guaranteed to the tribe just a few years earlier were suddenly opened to white settlement. Chief Joseph the Elder, on hearing what had been agreed in his name, reportedly tore up his copy of the earlier 1855 treaty and threw it on the ground.

His son, the younger Chief Joseph — Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it in Nez Perce, meaning “Thunder Rolling Down the Mountains” — would become one of the most celebrated, and most heartbreaking, figures in the history of the American West. In 1877, faced with forced removal to a reservation, Chief Joseph led his band of Niimíipuu on a 1,400-mile fighting retreat through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, attempting to reach Canada and safety. They fought the United States Army to a near standstill for four months across some of the most brutal terrain in North America. They came within 40 miles of the Canadian border before they were surrounded and forced to surrender in October 1877. Chief Joseph’s surrender speech — if it was reported accurately, which historians debate — contains the famous line about how he would “fight no more forever.” Whether those were his exact words or not, the sentiment was real enough.

Anyway. We pulled into the Visitors’ Centre at Spalding, which is run by the National Park Service, and as a consequence is genuinely excellent. This is one of the things the Americans consistently get right: their national parks facilities are well-funded, intelligently designed, and staffed by people who actually know what they’re talking about. We British could learn a thing or two, frankly, but that’s a whinge for another day.

We started in the small museum, which houses everyday artefacts of the Nez Perce — the sort of collection that brings a culture properly to life rather than reducing it to a few dusty curiosities behind glass. There were toys that children had played with, tools used in daily life, intricately decorated clothing, and ceremonial headpieces of considerable beauty. One of the most striking exhibits was a magnificent carved wooden statue of a Nez Perce horse decked out in full ceremonial regalia, and it rather stopped us in our tracks.

Horses deserve a moment here, because the Nez Perce relationship with them was genuinely extraordinary. Horses arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the early 18th century, having spread northward from Spanish settlements in the south, and the Niimíipuu took to them with remarkable enthusiasm. By the mid-18th century they had become celebrated horsemen, and uniquely among the Native American nations of the region, they engaged in selective breeding — carefully choosing which horses to breed in order to improve the strain. The result was the Appaloosa: a distinctive spotted horse of considerable intelligence, endurance, and beauty that carries the Nez Perce legacy to this day. The breed nearly vanished after the 1877 war, when the US Army confiscated or killed most of the Nez Perce horse herd, but it survived and was revived in the 20th century. There’s a certain stubbornness to that survival that feels entirely appropriate.

When we came back out of the museum, we found that several school parties had arrived, and one of the Rangers — all credit to her — had set up an interactive demonstration on how to build a tipi. We quietly slipped in at the back so that Jack and Emily could join in. Emily, characteristically, was in there immediately, no hesitation whatsoever, contributing with her usual cheerful lack of self-consciousness. Jack, equally characteristically, hung back, feeling — as he put it — that he was gate-crashing someone else’s performance. Which is fair enough, really. Some of us prefer to observe. I completely understand, Jack. I was the same at your age. I’m still the same now, if I’m honest.

After the demonstration wrapped up, we headed back inside to the park’s small theatre, where they showed a film covering the full sweep of Nez Perce history: from the early days of the Niimíipuu, through the encounter with Lewis and Clark, through the treaty years, through the terrible events of 1877 and Chief Joseph’s long retreat, and on to the modern day. It was very well done — honest about the history without being mawkish, and giving proper weight to the resilience of the Nez Perce people in the 150 years since. Because the story doesn’t end with the 1877 surrender. The Niimíipuu are still here, still a recognised nation, still working to preserve their language and culture, still breeding Appaloosa horses. A proud people, and they’ve had to be.

We could cheerfully have spent another two or three hours there, but the weather had other ideas. Storm clouds had been massing on the western horizon for the past hour in the way that clouds in this part of the world do — with a sort of grim deliberateness — and by the time we emerged from the theatre they were looking distinctly purposeful. We had time for a brief look at the outdoor exhibits, which include several of the original historical buildings from when the Spalding mission was established back in the 1830s, as well as later structures from when the agency was developed through the latter half of the 19th century. There’s a tangible sense of history in those old timber frames that no amount of indoor displays can quite replicate.

But the rain had its own schedule, and we had miles to go before Washington. We made our apologies to nobody in particular and got back in the car.