They also found a prehistoric stone scraper that was impossible to date on location.

“Because it’s an isolated resource found on the surface, we wouldn’t be able to assign a date to it,” said Kierson Crume, an archaeologist with the BLM who led the trip. “I wouldn’t be able to say one way or another if this was carried by the Nez Perce when it’s isolated like that.”

The Nez Perce were chased from their homeland in Oregon, Washington and Idaho in 1877 and ordered to reservations by the U.S. government. Some in the tribe resisted the orders and fighting broke out. Members of the tribe began their historic 1,170-mile flight across the West, looking to reach freedom in Canada.

Over the next few months, the Nez Perce would cross great expanses of rugged country, fending off the U.S. Army in battles at the Big Hole Valley in Montana and at Camas Meadows in Idaho. They crossed Yellowstone National Park and traveled through the Absarokas before emerging on the Wyoming prairie somewhere near the Clarks Fork Canyon.

By September 1877, Col. Samuel Sturgis and his men had joined pursuit. They waited for the Nez Perce near the mouth of the canyon, certain the band of Indians would emerge at this most likely geographical point.