Big Hole National Battlefield Administrative History

Chapter One:
The Battle and Its Aftermath (1877-1883)

Big Hole National Battlefield is both a memorial and a historic site. At this place in southwestern Montana on August 9, 1877, U.S. soldiers and citizen volunteers clashed with Nez Perce "hostiles" in one of the last and most dramatic of Indian Wars in the American West. Since that day, the battlefield has possessed an evocative power for Indians and non-Indians, battle participants and their descendants, locals and out-of-state visitors, U.S. citizens and foreigners. As a memorial, the quiet scene on the North Fork of the Big Hole River has engendered veneration of various kinds: grave marking, monument-building, commemorative ceremonies, and physical preservation. The battlefield is "sacred ground." [1] It is imbued with meaning not only by the events that took place on August 9, 1877, but also by the symbolic actions of the thousands of people who have visited the site in the 120 years since that day.

Big Hole National Battlefield is also an historic site. Beginning with the after-battle reports of Lt. Colonel John Gibbon and Brig. General O. O. Howard, people have been concerned with documenting and reconstructing what happened there. Battlefield visitors have come to learn, and battlefield caretakers have sought to interpret. First the U.S. Forest Service, then the National Park Service, managed the site to preserve historic features and cultural artifacts.

Like other American battlefields that have been preserved, Big Hole National Battlefield combines the qualities of a memorial and a historic site. Bridging the two, battlefield preservation has come to involve certain conventions that bear a complex relationship to historical time. Visitors expect the battlefield to evoke the feeling on the eve of the battle (a peaceful landscape, a lost world), and to present cues for visualizing the battle itself (named features, interpretive signs), and to memorialize the battle's legacy (graves, monuments, a place of solemn remembrance). In protecting, developing, and interpreting the battlefield, site managers have had to balance the demands of memorialization and historic preservation.