Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

Lewis and Clark entered the Nez Perce Country in September 1805. Having ascended the Missouri River to its head, they were seeking navigable waters to the Pacific. The rugged canyon of Idaho's Salmon River had rebuffed them and, traveling north to Montana's Bitterroot Valley, they had struck westward across the wilds of the Bitterroot Mountains on horses bartered from the Eastern Shoshonis. Though two Shoshonis helped them follow the high Lolo Trail, which the Nez Perces customarily used in going to the buffalo country, the season was late, and the expedition members floundered in snowstorms and almost starved. After extreme privations, an advance party of Clark and six hunters descended on September 20 to the snow-free meadows of Weippe Prairie where a fall encampment of Nez Perces was gathering camas roots.

". . . at the distance of 1 mile from the lodges," wrote Clark of this first encounter, "I met 3 Indian boys, when they saw me [they] ran and hid themselves, in the grass I desmounted gave my gun and horse to one of the men, searched in the grass and found 2 of the boys gave them Small pieces of ribin & sent them forward to the village Soon after a man Came out to meet me with great caution & Conducted me to a large Spacious lodge . . . those people gave us a Small piece of Buffalow meat, Some dried beries & roots in different States . . . I gave them a fiew Small articles as preasants. . . ."

The encampment was apparently that of Kamiah area villagers, and Clark learned that the band's great head chief, Tuna-kehm-mu-toolt, or Broken Arm, together with all the warriors, had left three days before in a southwesterly direction to fight their enemies, the Tewelka. These were the Western Shoshonis, Paiutes, and Bannocks, all of whom, together with the Eastern Shoshonis, Lewis and Clark and other whites had learned from more easterly tribes to refer to as Snake Indians. The great chief and the warriors were not expected back for another 15 or 18 days.

Guided by the Nez Perces, who provided food, Clark the next day reached the Clearwater River at present-day Greer and three kilometers (two miles) downstream stopped at a village whose elderly headman was Aleiya, which Clark understood meant The Twisted Hair. It was in this village that Wet-khoo-weis, the woman who had returned from the east, saw the whites and told her people to do the strangers no harm. Possibly for this reason, the Nez Perces showed the small band of explorers friendship and hospitality. The Twisted Hair welcomed them and the next day accompanied them back to Weippe Prairie where Lewis and the rest of the expedition had arrived weak and starving.

Though many of the whites became temporarily ill from dysentery, the food generously supplied them by the Nez Perces saved their lives, and they gradually regained their strength. At the same time, The Twisted Hair and other Nez Perces made maps on whitened elk skins to show them the water route ahead. Escorted by some Nez Perces—whom Lewis and Clark called the Chopunnish, which may have been a corruption of Sahaptian—they made their way down the Clearwater to a point opposite the mouth of the North Fork of that river, where they halted long enough to construct dugout canoes. On October 7, after caching some of their supplies and entrusting their horses to members of The Twisted Hair's family until they returned the next year, they left what is now known as Canoe Camp and set off down the Clearwater in the canoes.

They passed many small Nez Perce winter villages and fishing camps and at the site of present-day Lewiston turned into the Snake River. The two Eastern Shoshonis who had conducted them over the Bitterroot Mountains had meanwhile returned to their own tribe, but The Twisted Hair and another Nez Perce man went along with them down the Snake and Columbia rivers, helping them negotiate with the new peoples through whose countries they passed. At the great Dalles fishing center, the explorers finally parted with the two helpful Nez Perces and continued their journey to the Pacific Ocean.

The following spring, the explorers started up the Columbia again on their return trip home and by May 1806 were back among the Nez Perces on the Clearwater River. They recovered most of their horses from The Twisted Hair, who told them that the great war chiefs, who had missed them the previous fall, wanted to meet them.

The explorers distributed trade medals and American flags to the chiefs, and with the help of their Eastern Shoshoni traveling companion, Sacajawea, and a Western Shoshoni, who had been captured by the Nez Perces and spoke the Nez Perce language, described the powerful American nation in the east which they represented and the expedition's purposes. One goal, they explained, was to establish peace among all warring tribes so that they could erect trading houses where the people could go in safety and secure white men's goods.

The chiefs were skeptical that their enemies would agree to peace, but the prospect of being able to acquire white men's arms and other goods was appealing, and they said that they would consider the proposal.

The chiefs finally agreed to recommend to their bands "confidence in the information they had received" from Lewis and Clark. Broken Arm addressed all the people, "making known the deliberations of their council and impressing the necessity of unanimity among them." There was not a dissenting vote, and an old civil chief, who Lewis understood was the father of Red Grizzly Bear, told the explorers that the Nez Perces were "convinced of the advantages of peace and ardently wished to cultivate peace with their neighbors." He concluded with the promise "that the whitemen might be assured of their warmest attachment and that they would always give them every assistance in their power; that they were poor but their hearts were good."

Within the context of the history of future relations between the Nez Perces and white men, this council and the Nez Perces' promise of friendship and alliance with the Americans had an enduring significance. Word of the agreement was spread among the villages, and knowledge was passed from generation to generation that the Nez Perce leaders had given their word to Lewis and Clark, the first white men in their country. The Nez Perces who could later say that they had met or seen the American captains boasted about it with increasing pride and saw to it that the younger people understood the promise given in the Kamiah Valley, and that they honored it. Despite persecution and pressure, the tribe's friendship for Americans would persist with few interruptions until 1877, and white men in their country lived in debt to the spirit of friendship and mutual trust that existed between the Lewis and Clark expedition and its Nez Perce hosts.

Because of snow in the mountains, the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for several weeks among the Nez Perces in the Kamiah Valley. The longer the explorers were with the Nez Perces, the higher grew their regard for them. The Nez Perce "has shown much greater acts of hospitality than we have witnessed from any nation or tribe since we have passed the rocky mountains," Clark wrote. Early in June, the expedition members, guided by five Nez Perces, finally left their Long Camp site near Kamiah and successfully recrossed the Bitterroots to Montana.

On his way home, Meriwether Lewis tried to contact the Blackfeet to talk them into halting their warfare against the Nez Perces and western tribes, but he failed. A brief meeting with some Piegans, in fact, almost cost Lewis his life and only served to warn those Indians that Americans intended to open trade for goods, including arms, with their enemies west of the mountains. (pp. 46 – 52)