The Nez Perces: The History of Their Troubles and the Campaign of 1877 - Paperback

by Duncan McDonald (Author), Robert Bigart (Editor), Joseph McDonald (Editor)

This history of the Nez Perce War was written in 1878-79 by Duncan McDonald, a relative of Chief Looking Glass and the son of a Hudson's Bay Company fur trader and a Nez Perce Indian woman. McDonald spent most of his life on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana.

McDonald wrote the history based on interviews and family sources. In 1878 he traveled to Canada to interview Nez Perce chief White Bird and learn his side of the story. Remarkably, the history was published in a Deer Lodge, Montana, newspaper only a year or two after the war ended.

McDonald's Nez Perce War history is published with a historical introduction and selection of his other essays on Indian affairs, in which he objects to the United States government's unjust treatment of northwest Indian tribes and condemns the threats of some Montana whites to attack Indians who were friendly to the settlers.

Author Biography

​Duncan McDonald (1849-1937) was a fur trader, entrepreneur, historian, and tribal leader on the Flathead Indian Reservation. For many years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he played an important role as a cultural broker between the Indian and the white communities in western Montana. Robert Bigart is librarian emeritus at Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana. Joseph McDonald is president emeritus of Salish Kootenai College and the grandnephew of the author.