Finding Our Way 2 Hogeland, Stopping in a Place of Sorrow

Bear Paw Battlefield, Nez Perce National Historical Park
looking west toward the Bear Paw Mountains

Driving east from Chester to Hogeland on US Highway 2, our band of Hogeland pilgrims approached Chinook. I have always loved that word. I love the way it feels rolling through your mouth (I love speaking Italiano for the same reason!). As a child, the coming of the Chinook meant warm wind sweeping down from the Rockies to the plains around late February, relieving a long winter just in time for basketball tournaments. The snows melted, the roads cleared, and spring seemed imminent as new basketball champions were minted.

Chinook, the town, is more prosaic, but south of town lies the Bear Paw Battlefield, a place of conflict and sorrow. The battlefield unfolds across gently undulating plains within sight of the Bear Paw Mountains and marks the end of the Nez Perce flight from the US military toward sanctuary in Canada in October of 1877. The Nez Perce had traveled five months and 1,170 miles from their home in what is now eastern Oregon to reach this stopping off place, just 40 miles south of the Medicine Line (the Canadian border) and safety. About 700 men, women, and children faced five days of fighting and siege. Nearly 150 people escaped and made it to Canada. Around 430 were left to surrender. Upon surrender, Chief Joseph spoke one of the most famous lines born of the US - Native American conflicts: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever."

Standing on the battlefield now on a bright hot June day with barely enough wind to drive away the biting flies, I am filled with sadness and wonder. Given their proximity to Canada, their weakened state, and unlikely return to the US, why didn't the military let them go to join Sitting Bull's Lakota Sioux and be rid of them? Perhaps the answer lies partially in military pride: Company K of the 7th US Cavalry, defeated at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June, 1876, were among the pursuing troops. Vengeance must have been present, and belief in manifest destiny. What a waste.

Artifacts and famous paintings of the battlefield and prairie scenes by Lorenzo Ghiglieri are presented in the Blaine County Museum in Chinook. It's a splendid local museum, one of the best I've visited in Montana. For now, it is the interim visitor center for the Bear Paw Battlefield. I picked up brochures describing a self-guided auto tour of the 1,170-mile Nez Perce Trail, beginning in Wallowa Valley, Oregon and ending here. Now that would be a pilgrimage. But first, we must attend to Hogeland!