In 1806, Captain Clark and his party passed through this natural travel corridor, found great quantities of camas beginning to bloom, and relied on Sacajawea’s knowledge of the area as they left the forested mountain trails and headed toward the high mountain plain of Big Hole Valley, which Clark described as an open beautiful level valley about 20 miles wide and nearly 60 long, surrounded by high snow-covered mountain points. The valley remains much as Clark found it, with wildfire burning portions of the area and Columbian ground squirrels still burrowing in the meadows. This route had long been used by Indian tribes traveling east to the buffalo on the plains and west to the salmon in the rivers, though Clark noted that the trails scattered so widely across the open plain that his party could not pursue them. In August 1877, about 800 Nez Perce passed this way on their flight to freedom, believing they had left the conflict behind, but Colonel Gibbon was following them; although some young men wanted to scout back along the trail, Chief Looking Glass refused because doing so would violate the trust of their peace agreement with Bitterroot settlers. On August 9, 1877, the silence of dawn was broken by an attack from Gibbon’s 7th U.S. Infantry and the Bitterroot Volunteers under Captain John B. Catlin against the Nez Perce as they slept beside the river.