Tipahxlee’whum, also called Tepahlewam or Split Rocks, was the Nez Perce name for Tolo Lake, where five bands of Nimiipuu gathered in early June 1877 for their last taste of freedom before entering the Nez Perce Reservation after the U.S. government ordered them from their ancestral homelands and threatened force if they did not comply. As they spoke of the injustices of losing their land and of unpunished depredations by some settlers and miners against their people, the young men grew angrier by the hour, and a traditional place of happy memories, where Nez Perce had long come to harvest camas, play games, sing, race horses, and socialize in peace, became a camp of war. Tolo Lake was named for a Nez Perce woman who rode twenty miles from Slate Creek to the mines at Florence in 1877 to warn her white friends of impending danger when they were gathered behind a hastily constructed stockade and could spare no man to travel; she was one of many on both sides who did not want war. The lake also lay near an old Nimiipuu trail within a vast network of early trails, parts of which are still visible today; in the spring of 1806, Sergeant John Ordway, with Privates Frazer and Weiser, likely passed north of the lake while traveling from Camp Chopunnish near Kamiah to the Snake River to trade for salmon with Nez Perce near the mouth of Deer Creek during the Lewis and Clark expedition. Tolo Lake also proved to be the graveyard of several Columbian mammoths: in 1994, sediment removal to improve fish habitat brought mammoth bones to the surface, and eventually over 400 bones were recovered. How the lake formed over 10,000 years ago, and why the remains of so many long-extinct creatures were concentrated there, remains a mystery, though one possible explanation is that the lake began as an artesian source whose treacherous and unpredictable surface drew large mammals to water and trapped those that died there, their bones preserved by clay in the soil.