Sahaptin

The Sahaptin tribes inhabited territory along the Columbia River and its tributaries in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

According to early written accounts, Sahaptin-speaking peoples inhabited the southern portion of the Columbia Basin in Washington and Oregon.

Several villages were located west of the Cascade mountains in southern Washington, including those of the Upper Cowlitz tribe, and some of the Klickitat.

They frequently competed with the Salishan-speaking tribes on their northern border, including the Flathead, Coeur d'Alene and Spokane.

Contributing causes were incessant wars with the more powerful Blackfeet in earlier years; a wasting fever, and measles epidemic (1847) from contact with immigrants; smallpox and other infectious diseases following the occupation of the country by miners after 1860; losses in the war of 1877 and subsequent removals; and wholesale spread of consumption because of outside contact.

They occasionally performed sweat ceremonies by steam produced by pouring water upon hot stones placed in the centre.

The women made varieties of baskets and bags woven of rushes or grass, and used wooden mortars for pounding roots.

The women gathered and processed many wild roots and berries, sometimes combining them with cooked meats and drying the mixture.

Aside from fish and game, chiefly salmon and deer, their principal foods were the roots of the camas (Camassia quamash) and kouse (Lomatium cous).

Catholic Canadian and Iroquois employees of the Hudson's Bay Company passed on some ideas about Christianity to the Nez Percés.

A Presbyterian mission was established in 1837 among the Nez Percés at Lapwai, near the present Lewiston, Idaho, by Reverend Henry H. Spalding.

Regular Catholic work in the same region began with the advent of Fathers François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers along the Columbia in 1838).

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, assigned from St. Louis, Missouri, and other Jesuits operated in the Flathead country beginning in 1840.

The establishment of the Oregon Trail through the country of the Nez Percé and allied tribes resulted in the passage of many more European Americans and introduction of an epidemic disease.

When the Catholic Bishop Brouillet arrived, who had intended to meet with Whitman about purchase of the mission property, he was allowed to bury the dead.

In 1863, in consequence of the discovery of gold, another treaty was negotiated between Nez Percés chief Lawyer (whose band had converted to Christianity and was assimilating to white culture) and General Oliver O. Howard of the U.S. Army.

Since Nez Percés custom dictated that no single chief spoke for all others, when Joseph and others (including Toohoolhoolzote and Looking Glass) refused to sign the treaty, it was done so with the understanding that the U.S. Government was still bound by their original agreement.

But, General Howard reportedly gathered numerous other Nez Percé to make their "X" on the document, to give the appearance that Joseph and the other chiefs had signed the treaty.

Chief Joseph steadfastly refused to be a party to the treaty or to its terms, relenting only when it became clear that the survival of his people depended on it.

But as they made the arduous trek out of their home land and to the new reservation, a small group of young Nez Percés warriors broke off and killed numerous white settlers along the Salmon River.

After successfully holding in check for some months the regular Army troops and a large force of Indian scouts, Joseph, Looking Glass, and other chiefs conducted a retreat to the north for over a thousand miles across the mountains.