Montana Yesterday

Posted By admin on July 28, 2009

Will Moss’s story in Sunday’s Ravalli Republic and Missoulian told of the end of the 2009 Chief Joseph Trail Ride at the Big Hole National Battlefield on Sunday. Today marks the anniversary of a notable Saturday night in the flight of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce. Anybody out there have any Fort Fizzle anecdotes to add?

Capt. Charles Rawn had met the day before with chiefs near a hastily installed barricade on Lolo Creek. Some 700 men, women and children were fleeing with 2,000 horses from soldiers in Idaho.

Rawn arrived in western Montana a month earlier to begin construction of the new Fort Missoula. He was ordered to block the path of the Nez Perce after a series of engagements with Gen. O.O. Howard on the Idaho side.

“I had a talk with Chiefs Joseph, White Bird and Looking Glass, who proposed if allowed to pass unmolested, to march peaceably thru the Bitter-root valley, but I refused to allow them to pass unless they complied with my stipulations as to the surrender of their arms,” Rawn later reported, adding, “We separated without agreement.”

On this night, the Indians took to the ridge to the north of the canyon and slipped around Rawn’s troops unmolested. The spot will forever more be known as Fort Fizzle. By the next evening they were camped with Chief Charlo and their Salish friends near Stevensville, en route up the Bitterroot Valley.

Category: 1870s-1880s, Missoula history, Native Americans, War, Western Montana history
Tags: Capt. Charles Rawn, Chief Joseph, Fort Fizzle, Fort Missoula, Lolo Creek, Looking Glass, Nez Perce War, White Bird