First Encounter: Salvation at Weippe Prairie
When Clark’s advance party stumbled out of the Bitterroot Mountains in late September 1805 — half-starved, exhausted, and unsure whether they would survive the descent — they encountered the Nez Perce on the Weippe Prairie. The editorial summary preserved in the record (entry of 1805-09-20) captures the moment plainly:
The Plains appeared covered with Spectators viewing the white men.
The Nez Perce, identified by Clark and Lewis throughout the journals as the Chopunnish or Pierced Noses, fed the famished men dried salmon and camas roots. The sudden change of diet sickened many of the party, but the encounter likely saved the expedition. Nez Perce oral tradition holds that a woman named Watkuweis, who had previously been treated kindly by Euro-Americans, urged her people not to harm the strangers. They did more than spare them: they pastured the expedition’s horses through the winter and welcomed the Corps back the following spring.
Naming and Identification on the Columbia
Clark formally distinguished the Nez Perce from neighboring nations during the descent of the Snake (Lewis’s) and Columbia rivers. On 18 October 1805 he recorded the geography of the forks and the peoples living along them:
Names of this nation above the mouth of the Ki-moo-e-nim is So-Kulk Perced noses The Names of the nation on the Kimoenim River is Chopun-nish Piercd noses
The captains’ Chopunnish became the standard journal designation. Lewis would later note (20 April 1806) that some Chopunnish men wore shirts of the same form with those of the Shoshone Chopunnish &c highly ornamented with porcupine quills.
Early Reputation Among the Western Nations
Even before the Corps reached Nez Perce country, the nation’s reputation had reached the captains. The editorial entry of 18 April 1805 (concerning Seaman, Lewis’s Newfoundland) records that The Shoshone, Nez Perce, and various Plains nations all made overtures to acquire Seaman
— offers Lewis consistently refused. The Nez Perce’s wide-ranging horse herds and their connections eastward across the Bitterroots placed them at the center of an interior trading network the Corps would come to depend on.
The Long Winter Apart and a Honeysuckle on the Kooskooske
While wintering at Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark made repeated reference to the Chopunnish in their natural-history compilations, using the people’s territory as a geographic anchor for the plants and animals of the interior. On 7 February 1806 both captains wrote nearly identical passages:
I first met with it on the waters of the Kooskooske near the Chopunnish Nation, and again below the grand rapids in the Columbian Vally on tide water.
Similar references appear on 15 February 1806 (the common red deer under the rocky mts. in the neighbourhood of the Chopunnish
) and in entries of 6–7 March 1806. The Chopunnish country had become, in the captains’ mental map, the threshold between the Columbian lowlands and the Rockies.
The Spring Return: Re-engaging the Chopunnish
The expedition’s planning in early April 1806 was organized entirely around reaching the Nez Perce. On 2 April 1806 Clark and Lewis recorded a joint resolution:
to remain at our present encampment or Some where in this neighbourhood untill we had obtained as much dried meat as would be necessary for our voyage as far as the Chopunnish.
They intended to barter canoes for horses on the way up, sending an advance party from the enterance of Lewis’s River
to gather the horses left with the Nez Perce the previous fall. Lewis added that they viewed horses as our only Certain resource for food
for the mountain crossing.
A Chopunnish Traveling Companion
From mid-April onward, a Chopunnish man and his family traveled with the Corps eastward across the Columbia plain. He served as guide, advisor, and sometimes horse-trader. On 24 April 1806 Clark noted that they hired 3 others of the Chopunnish man who accompanies us with his family.
On 30 April Clark and Lewis both recorded an ethnographic detail learned from this family:
this man has a doughter now arived at the age of puberty who being in a certain Situation-is not permited to acoiate with the family but Sleeps at a distance from her father’s Camp… in this State I am informed that the female is not permited to eat, nor to touch any article of a culinary nature or manly occupation.
The same man’s counsel proved decisive on 1 May 1806, when he and the expedition’s guide debated which fork of the trail to follow; the captains, persuaded by the guide, kept to the creek route.
Reunion at the Kooskooske
Re-entering Nez Perce country in early May 1806, the Corps was met with extraordinary generosity. On 5 May Clark recorded a gift that recalled an act of medical kindness from the previous fall:
he brought foward a very eligant Gray mare and gave her to me, requesting Some eye water… While we were encamped last fall at the enterance of Chopunnish river, I gave an Indian man some volitile leniment to rub his knee and thye for a pain of which he Complained. the fellow Soon after recovered and have never Seased to extol the virtue of our medicines.
Lewis’s parallel entry confirms that Clark’s reputation as a physician — the skill of my friend Capt C. as a phisician
— had spread among the Chopunnish, producing a steady traffic of patients who sought eye-water and liniments and who often paid in horses, dogs, and bread.
On 6 May the husband of a sick woman, as Clark wrote, was as good as his word. he produced us a young horse in tolerable order which we imedeately had killed and butchered.
A second horse was given for treatment of a girl with rheumatism. The same day, Lewis exchanged horses with the Chopunnish leader We-ark-koomt, gaining what he called an eligant strong active well broke horse perfictly calculated for my purposes.
The Chopunnish Chiefs
By 11 May 1806, after several days of councils, Lewis had identified the leadership structure of the nation:
we now pretty fully informed ourselves that Tunnachemootoolt, Neeshneparkkeeook, Yoomparkkartim and Hohastillpilp were the principal Cheif of the Chopunnish nation and ranked in the order here mentioned
The captains gave Yoom-park-kar-tim — a stout fellow of good countenance about 40 years of age
who had lost his left eye — a medal of the small size, reserving the last large Jefferson medal for some great Cheif on the Yellow rock river.
A young man, son of a chief recently killed by enemies from the northeast, presented the captains with a mare and colt as a pledge of friendship. Twisted Hair, who had cared for the expedition’s horses through the winter, brought in six of them all in fine order
(Clark, 11 May 1806).
Healers and Patients
The Chopunnish encampment of May 1806 became something close to a clinic. Clark wrote on 11 May:
Great numbers of Indians apply to us for medical aide which we gave them Cherfully So far as our Skill and Store of Medicine would enable us. Schrofla, ulsers, rhumitism, Sore eyes, and the loss of the use of their Limbs are the most common cases among them.
Lewis confirmed on 6 May that sore eyes is an universal complaint with all the natives we have seen on the west side of the Rocky mountains.
The exchange of medicine for horses, dogs, bread, and roots sustained the Corps during the long wait for the Bitterroot snows to melt.
Manner and Material Culture
Lewis’s 20 April 1806 entry — though made among the Eneshur and Skillute — explicitly compares the dress of those peoples to that of the Chopunnish, with whom the captains were now intimately familiar. Chopunnish men wore leggings, moccasins, and large robes, with porcupine-quill-ornamented shirts. Their horses were numerous and good; their plains were extensive; their hospitality, as the entries of May 1806 repeatedly attest, was unfailing.
Significance in the Expedition Record
No nation west of the Mandan villages appears more often or more sympathetically in the journals than the Nez Perce. They saved the Corps in September 1805, kept its horses alive through the winter, fed and guided it during the long spring of 1806, and accepted Clark’s medical services in lieu of trade goods the captains no longer possessed. The captains’ shorthand — as far as the Chopunnish
— became, in the spring of 1806, a synonym for survival itself.
