Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877

As friends of the white American, the Nez Perce Indians aided the exhausted explorers Lewis and Clark in 1805, only to be repeatedly misled by white treaties over the next seventy years. In 1877, a handful of renegade warriors struck back by massacring eighteen settlers in Idaho, setting off one of the bloddiest and most tragic Indian wars of the century.

This is the story of the dramatic 1200 mile chase through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, in which some 800 Nez Perce men, women and children attempted to fight their way to freedom in Canada.

Having personally retraced the entire war route. Bruce Hampton evokes flesh-and-blood characters from both sides of the war with such immediacy that readers can almost feel the ground tremble under thousands of hooves and hear the anguished cries of the women and children who fell to U.S. army bullets.