Summary: After the Civil War, U.S. policy was to force all Indians to live on reservations. In 1877, a group of Nez Perce Indians attempted to escape to Canada, fighting off hundreds of American troops over a 1,500-mile chase through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, besting U.S. forces in every military engagement except the last—and finally surrendering thirty miles from the Canadian border. The Nez Perce War is one of the most famous wars in the history of conquest of indigenous peoples on this continent by the United States.
