Lower Birch Creek Valley has long been a natural travel route between the Salmon River and the Snake River Plain, with Birch Creek rising from springs between the Lemhi and Beaverhead Mountains, flowing south across the valley floor, and ending in shallow sinks on the Snake River Plain. Archaeological research traces human occupation here back more than 10,000 years, from Paleoindian hunters living in a cooler, wetter environment with mammoth, horse, camel, giant bison, and other extinct megafauna, to later Native American visitors who adapted to a warmer, drier climate and used spears with replaceable points and atlatls to hunt deer, elk, moose, modern bison, antelope, and mountain sheep. These forerunners of today’s Northern Shoshone lived in family bands, traveled seasonally through the valley, and hunted, fished, and gathered camas, pine nuts, and other edible plants, leaving records of their activities on limestone cliffs and rock faces. In the early eighteen hundreds, British and American trappers competed here for beaver pelts, and in the fall of eighteen thirty John Work of the Hudson’s Bay Company camped near Birch Creek’s springs and recorded many bison in the valley. W.A. Scott became the valley’s first settler in 1882, building a cabin near the springs, and by the late 1890s Maier Kaufman’s ranch included a school, hotel, and post office. The valley also stands within the homelands of the Shoshone and Bannock Tribes, whose history in Idaho’s valleys, rivers, streams, and mountains long predates Sacajawea; they aided neighboring tribes, explorers, mountain men, pioneers, and settlers, endured removal from their homelands and broken promises and treaties, and continue to return to gather, harvest, hunt, and fish on lands they hold sacred. The valley’s history is also tied to the Nez Perce conflict of 1877, which followed the reduction of the Nez Perce homeland after the treaties of 1855 and 1863 and the order to move to the reservation near Lapwai. During the ensuing flight, nearly 800 Nez Perce men, women, and children with more than 2000 horses crossed mountains and plains under attack by five U.S. Army regiments, came within 40 miles of Canada, and after five days under cannon fire, freezing temperatures, and starvation, Chief Joseph surrendered on October 5, 1877, while Chief Whitebird escaped to Canada with some followers. Joseph and his people were exiled to Kansas and Indian Territory before 268 survivors were allowed to return to the Northwest in 1885, though the tribe was never allowed to reclaim its Wallowa homeland. Near Birch Creek on August 15, 1877, an advance party of Nez Perce warriors encountered freight wagons on the Mormon Trail carrying supplies for George L. Shoup and Company in Salmon City; after the wagons were ransacked and burned, James Hayden, Albert Green, Daniel Combs, and two unidentified men were killed, while Albert Lyon and two Chinese cooks escaped, and the Nez Perce continued south and east toward Camas Meadows and the Yellowstone country.