In 1877 Nez Perce warriors fought U.S. troops to a standstill, during the 1,200-mile epic retreat toward Canada. Martin Stadius tells the story as he follows the Nez Perce National Historic Trail. Stadius' crisp, entertaining writing style makes Dreamers more than a history book. "A remarkable personal quest. Martin Stadius sets off to truly tell the story of the Nez Perce, the Real People. He follows the trail through the archives and over every mile of their odyssey, a journey both exhilarating and heartbreaking. This is blue-highways, tramp-the-weeds history at its best." Elliott West, Professor of Native American Studies, Univ. of Arkansas (Elliott West) "Martin Stadius gives the reader a vivid account of the feelings he got while traveling the rugged 1,200 mile retreat route taken by Chief Joseph and his people over terrain which remains little changed today. For anyone interested in the incredible saga of the flight toward freedom by the courageous Nez Perce, this is a "must-read" book." Bill Gulick, author of Chief Joseph Country (Bill Gulick) "Stadius' writing style is arresting, as he splices together historical events with his travels along the Nez Perce National Historic Trail. . . Dreamers is an important book, if only to help us understand another part of the Pacific Northwest's history. Though studius and research-filled, Dreamers does not read like a dry, dusty textbook. Instead it brings alive an important and tragic chapter of our region's past." Tri-City Herald ( Tri-City Herald ) --Tri-City Herald Martin Stadius is a native of the West with more than twenty years experience in the book business and lives in Portland, Oregon. He began his study of the Nez Perce war in 1992, after reading about the new National Historic Trail, and visiting White Bird, where the first battle of the conflict was fought. DREAMERS: On the Trail of the Nez Perce by Martin Stadius PROLOGUE A few minutes after ten on a blustery and overcast June morning, I was late. My 1972 Volkswagon Westfalia struggled in third gear toward the summit of White Bird Hill on U.S. Highway 95 in central Idaho. I kept company with the eighteen-wheelers in the slow lane, practicing the patience learned by all drivers of geriatric VW vans. Passing through a cut at the top of the divide, we began the long glide down White Bird Canyon toward its juncture with the Salmon River eight miles to the south. The trucks continued to crawl from the pass as slowly as we ascended, their drivers heeding the strident warning signs about the steep descent, but I slid my van into the passing lane and slipped it into fourth gear, drifting down through one sweeping curve after another. The pavement gripped the west canyon wall as a dramatic vista unfolded two thousand feet below. The slope from the highway fell precipitously to a sere canyon floor several miles wide, there a jumble of bare ridges and ravines, knolls and swales. White Bird Creek snaked through the dun expanse, a slender braid of green falling from its source somewhere in the mountains. Beyond the creek the far canyon wall ramped steadily upward to a distant tree line where turbulent clouds glided across the horizon. After several miles I spotted an overlook on the other side of the highway where a crowd of sixty or so had gathered. Braking hard, I managed to cut my van across the oncoming traffic. As the van lurched to a halt in the parking lot, my foot slipped off the clutch. The engine rattled noisily then stalled, and people turned to stare curiously. Graceful, Martin. I got out with my camera and stood near the railing at the back edge of the scattered audience. Scheduled for ten o'clock, the ceremony had not yet begun, so I took in the view of the canyon floor now only six hundred feet below. The opening battle of the Nez Perce War of 1877 had flared amid the contorted terrain on the near side of the canyon bottom. I struggled to imagine what it must have been like that June morning: the thin line of about one hundred cavalry and civilian volunteers stretched along a ridge line, two waves of warriors advancing led by three men wearing red blankets to draw the soldiers' fire. Seventy years of peace between the Nez Perce and whites, seventy years since Lewis and Clark had first stumbled into the homeland of the Nez Perce, disappearing in a tumult of gunsmoke and dust and shouts. So you're from Oregon, a voice said over my shoulder. I turned to find a man probably in his fifties, fit and tall with a graying beard and thick glasses. He nodded toward the license plates on my van, and I confessed I was from Portland. He asked if I was on vacation. Well, sort of. I'd quit my job in the spring, just before I turned forty, sold most of my household goods and put the rest in storage. I had a few dollars socked away and had been pretty much bumming around ever since, camping wherever it fit my fancy, fishing here and there on some smaller streams not overrun with anglers, hanging out