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Essay on How The Indians Viewed The Westward Expansion
In 1805, when visited by Lewis and Clark, the Nez Percéwere occupying a large region in W Idaho, NE Oregon, and SE Washington. In the 1830s the Nez Percé, then numbering some 6,000, attracted national attention by sending emissaries to St. Louis to ask for books and teachers. Their request attracted to the Pacific Northwest missionaries, who played an important role in opening the region to settlement. In 1855 the Nez Percé ceded a large part of their territory to the United States.
The gold rushes in the 1860s and 1870s, however, brought large numbers of miners and settlers onto their lands, and in 1863 a treaty of cession was fraudulently extracted from part of the tribe, confining the Nez Percé to a reservation in NW Idaho. A band of the tribe living in Oregon refused to relocate, leading to the uprising under Chief Joseph in 1877. Following their defeat, many of the survivors ended up at the Colville Reservation in Washington. (Lavender 16)
The tribe used to rule Wallowa country in northeastern Oregon and welcomed the arrival of Whites in the early 1800s. However, the discovery of gold on the land in 1860 forced the tribe to move to a small reservation at Lapwai. Two hundred years ago the Nez Perce were kings of this broad, beautiful country. They were salmon fishers, gatherers of camass root, and superb riders who bred Appaloosas, which are said to take their name from the Palouse country of eastern Washington, also part of the tribe's domain.
The Nez Perce's world changed on September 20, 1805, when seven strangers wandered out of the Bitterroot Mountains. They were from the Lewis and Clark party. The tribe's relations with the white strangers, and the strangers who followed them, were amicable. For nearly 60 years the Nez Perce accepted white settlers......
