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This powerful account of the tragic defeat of the Nez Perce Indians in 1877 by the United States Army is narrated by Chief Joseph's strong and brave daughter. -
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new struggle raged in the Northern Rockies. In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life. -
Missionary Henry Spalding shipped two barrels of "Indian curiosities"--exquisite Nez Perce shirts, dresses, baskets, and horse regalia--to Dr. Dudley Allen in 1847. Donated to Oberlin College in 1893 and transferred to the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) in 1942, the collection languished in storage until Nez Perce National Historic Park curators rediscovered it in 1976. The OHS loaned most of the artifacts to the National Park Service. Twelve years later, the OHS abruptly recalled the collection, demanding the full appraised value of $608,100. Given just six-months to raise the funds, the tribe mounted a brilliant grassroots campaign. One day before the deadline, they met their goal. The author draws on interviews with Nez Perce experts and extensive archival research to tell the fascinating Spalding-Allen Collection story. He also examines the ethics of acquiring, bartering, owning, and selling Native cultural history. -
Lucullus V. McWhorter devoted much of his life to preserving the history of the Nez Perce and Yakama Indians of the Pacific Northwest's interior plateau region. McWhorter held a unique role as Nez Perce tribal historian and gatherer of tradition lore from both treaty and non-treaty bands. In Voice of the Old Wolf, Steve Evans helps to fill a gap in Nez Perce history, focusing on the 1880s to the 1940s, a period often neglected by the many historians of the 1877 war.
