Nimiipuu

The Nimiipuu, meaning we the people in their Sahaptin tongue, are the dominant nation of the southeastern Columbia Plateau, whose villages and horse camps spread along the Clearwater, Salmon and Snake rivers and over the Camas Prairie and Wallowa country.

French Canadian fur traders of the late eighteenth century fastened on them the exonym Nez Percé, pierced nose, although the Nimiipuu never pierced their noses.

Horses reached them in the eighteenth century, and they became skilled breeders of the spotted Appaloosa, riding east to hunt bison on the Montana plains and trading from the Pacific shore to the Great Basin. The Lewis and Clark Expedition met them in 1805, and in 1836 the Presbyterian missionary Henry Spalding built the Lapwai station on the Clearwater, where he and his wife Eliza ran a school and reduced the language to writing.