At White Bird Battlefield, the rolling hills were the scene of the first battle of the Nez Perce War. At dawn on June 17, 1877, columns of U.S. Army cavalry and local volunteers rode down the slopes toward Nez Perce camps in the stream valley, intending to bring a few warriors to justice and persuade the Nez Perce to move onto the reservation. Beyond the middle ridge, a small Nez Perce peace delegation approached carrying a white flag, but after several gunshots were fired for unknown reasons, intense firing erupted along the ridge. Within ten minutes, the cavalry and volunteers retreated in disorder, with two or three Nez Perce wounded and thirty-four soldiers killed. The conflict grew from sharply different views of land in a homeland of seventeen million acres where the Nez Perce had lived for thousands of years; the Treaty of 1855 set aside part of that homeland as a reservation, and after gold was discovered, the Treaty of 1863 reduced the reservation by ninety percent. Many Nez Perce rejected what they called the Steal Treaty and refused to leave their home valleys, and the injustice and violence arising from the treaty led ultimately to conflict here. After the one-sided rout, the Nez Perce broke camp, gathered abandoned army guns and ammunition, and prepared for a perilous journey, knowing the army's response would be massive. Their victory made war inevitable, and as the U.S. Army escalated the conflict into a nationwide effort to suppress the Nez Perce, many understood they might never again see their ancestral homeland.