CHILDREN OF GRACE

A comprehensive, meticulously researched history of the 1877 war between the Nez Perce and the US government. For decades, the Nez Perce had befriended whites (including Lewis and Clark) who crossed their territory in what's now the Northwest; in turn, explorers and settlers had praised the Nez Perce's peaceful, patriarchal society. But when the federal government, breaking a number of treaties, demanded that the Nez Perce surrender their homeland and move onto reservations, the alliance shattered. Violence erupted with the massacre of 18 white settlers by a band of Nez Perce warriors, an atrocity described in vivid detail by Hampton (who teaches at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming). The US Army—an undisciplined, uneducated, poorly supplied force in those post-Civil War years- -swung into action, and the Nez Perce retreated into Montana, Wyoming, and Canada on a 1200-mile march punctuated by cruelty and kindness on both sides. Hampton offers an hour-by-hour account of the major battles, as well as crisp portraits of the principal figures in the conflict. At first, the Indians placed their hopes in the silver-tongued Chief Joseph, forever identified in the popular imagination with the Nez Perce cause, but the author makes it clear that the disaffected warriors soon turned to other chiefs like Poker Joe and Looking Glass. Meanwhile, against the Indians stood a number of notable cavalry officers, including Nelson Miles and Oliver Howard. The outcome was predictably sordid, as the few hundred remaining Nez Perce surrendered and suffered a long internment at Leavenworth Prison before returning, with their society in shambles, back to the Northwest. Exciting and fair-minded: the definitive account of a dark hour in American history. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)