Throughout the 1850s, Native peoples of the inland Northwest actively resisted white encroachments into their traditional territories. Tensions exploded in 1858 when nearly one thousand Palouses, Spokanes, and Coeur d'Alenes routed an invading force commanded by Colonel Edward Steptoe. In response, Colonel George Wright mounted a large expedition into the heart of the Columbia Plateau to punish and subdue its Native peoples. Opposing Wright's force was a loose confederacy of tribes led by the famous warrior Kamiakin. Indian War in the Pacific Northwest is a vivid and valuable first-person...

The Official Proceedings at the Council in the Walla Walla Valley and Lawrence Kips Indian Council in the Walla Walla Valley, along with James Dotys Journal of Operations, are an exlent source of first hand information on the treaty proceedings. Also reprinted are the texts of the three treaties signed at the end of the council, and the text of three more conferences held by the military authorities with several of these tribesman after the battles of 1855 and 1856. These documents provide an insight, however imperfectly translated, into the way the Columbia basin Native Americans viewed what...