Big Hole National Battlefield

The first thing the government put on this ground was a monument to the soldiers. In 1883 the Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, authorized $800 for a granite shaft over the graves in the pines where Colonel John Gibbon's command had dug in, and it carried the names of every officer and enlisted man killed. When President Taft made a national monument here on June 23, 1910, it covered about five acres: the siege area, and nothing else. The meadow across the river, where some eight hundred Nimiipuu had pitched their lodges and where most of the dying was done, lay outside the line.

It stayed outside for half a century. Congress authorized the additions in 1963, the monument became Big Hole National Battlefield on May 17 that year, and over the following decade the encampment, the hill where Nimiipuu warriors captured Gibbon's mountain howitzer and the old horse pasture came inside the boundary. From the late 1960s park staff and Nimiipuu descendants began setting up bare tipi frames on the meadow where the lodges had stood. They are memorials, not reconstructions, and what people leave on them are offerings; leave them where they are.

Three trails start below the visitor center. The Nez Perce Camp Trail follows the North Fork through the frames. The Siege Area Trail climbs into the trees to the soldiers' rifle pits and the 1883 monument, and a steeper spur leads to the howitzer site, where a replica gun looks out over the whole valley. The camas the women were digging on August 8 still blooms blue on the meadow in late June. The trails are open sunrise to sunset all year, west of Wisdom on MT-43.