{"id":1844,"slug":"big-hole-national-battlefield-montana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Big Hole is the meadow where the flight turned — the August 9, 1877 dawn attack that Colonel Gibbon's Seventh Infantry made on the sleeping Nez Perce camp on the North Fork, after the bands had crossed Lolo Pass believing the war was behind them. 'War was quit,' Yellow Wolf remembered of the night before. 'All Montana citizens our friends.' The first shot killed an old man checking the horses; the volleys went into the tipis.","The Nez Perce fought back — took the soldiers' howitzer, pinned the attack down, and held the field while the camp escaped. Sixty to ninety of them died, mostly women and children; Gibbon lost thirty-one. It was the army's worst defeat of the flight, and it didn't stop the march — the Nez Perce went on to Yellowstone and the Bear Paw. The battlefield is sacred ground now, the tipi poles and the grave markers kept by the Park Service and the tribe.","The file keeps Big Hole: the sleeping camp, the dawn volleys, the captured howitzer, and the meadow where the flight's worst day was also its resistance.","Big Hole is the archive's Nez Perce file — the surprise attack, the fight back, and the ground the tribe still holds sacred."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Big Hole is the archive's Nez Perce file — the 1877 dawn attack, the captured howitzer, and the battlefield the tribe keeps.","A meadow attacked at dawn keeps its poles — the file's suggestion being that Big Hole's hold is the wrong war: the camp that thought it was safe, the soldiers who fired into tipis, and the ground where the flight refused to end."]}],"name":"Big Hole National Battlefield","aliases":[],"type":"BATTLEFIELD","type_label":"Battlefield","cats":["DARK_HISTORY"],"groups":["dark-history"],"desc":"Memorial to the 1877 attack on a Nez Perce camp near Wisdom.","full_desc":"Big Hole National Battlefield is a battlefield in Wisdom, Montana, a National Battlefield. Memorial to the 1877 attack on a Nez Perce camp near Wisdom. HauntHunt files it with dark history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. The site is open to visitors. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Wisdom","county":null,"state":"Montana","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":45.609988,"lon":-113.445749,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":"National Battlefield","current_use":null,"research_notes":"Included for documented public dark history. No paranormal or haunting claim inferred from suffering, deaths or abandonment. Site-specific access and precise coordinates require further research.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.3,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.35,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"U.S. troops attacked on August 9, 1877. By August 10, almost ninety Nez Perce and thirty-one soldiers and volunteers had died, according to NPS. The site's documented military history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Big Hole National Battlefield'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Big Hole National Battlefield","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/big-hole-national-battlefield.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[{"name":"Battle of the Big Hole","type":"BATTLE","date_start":"1877-08-09","date_end":null,"description":"Before dawn on August 9, 1877, Col. John Gibbon's troops stormed the sleeping Nez Perce encampment in the Big Hole valley, killing scores — many of them women and children — before the warriors counterattacked and pinned the soldiers in a hillside siege. The two-day fight cost both sides dearly and became one of the bloodiest episodes of the Nez Perce flight toward Canada.","evidence":"BATTLE","source":{"name":"Big Hole National Battlefield","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/big-hole-national-battlefield.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"accessibility":"Wheelchair-accessible facilities listed; individual trails require verification","public_restroom":"Available","last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T10:36:21+00:00","source":{"name":"Big Hole National Battlefield","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/big-hole-national-battlefield.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}},"sources":[{"name":"Big Hole National Battlefield","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/big-hole-national-battlefield.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Big Hole National Battlefield","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole_National_Battlefield","desc":"Historical battlefield in Montana, United States","extract":"Big Hole National Battlefield preserves a battlefield in the western United States, located in Beaverhead County, Montana. In 1877, the Nez Perce fought a delaying action against the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Regiment here on August 9 and 10, during their failed attempt to escape to Canada. This action, the Battle of the Big Hole, was the largest battle fought between the Nez Perce and U.S. government forces in the five-month conflict known as the Nez Perce War.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Big_Hole_Battlefield.jpg/330px-Big_Hole_Battlefield.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":93,"lat":45.6375,"lon":-113.64361111},"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}