Famous for vowing, ‘I will fight no more forever,’ the Nez Perce leader never gave up the fight to return to his homeland in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley.
Simple words, and who would even imagine doing such a thing? But for Joseph, chief of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce Indians, they had great meaning when his father shared them. Joseph had seen the white people come into his land with their canvas-topped wagons, and he had seen an erosion of tribal lands in the Columbia Basin when Washington Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens, who doubled as territorial superintendent of Indian Affairs, conducted a treaty council in 1855. The chief knew that the men and women traveling to the West—particularly those coming into the region long used by the Nez Perces, Cayuses, Umatillas, Wanapums and Palouses—would want more territory.
As Joseph’s father lay near death in 1871, his eyes clouded with age, he told the son who shared his name: “My son, my body is returning to my mother earth; my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land.” These final instructions for the young man who would step into his father’s shoes upon his death went deep into his heart and became the guiding principle for the remainder of his life.
Chief Joseph is most remembered for his surrender statement to federal troops commanded by Brig. Gen. Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles at the Bear’s Paw (or Bear Paw) battlefield in northern Montana Territory in 1877: “I am tired of fighting.…Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” But this man who had been fighting for the rights of his tribe for more than a decade would not rest for the next quarter century in his desire to return to the Nez Perce land of his youth—the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon.
What had brought Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces to that windswept battlefield in north-central Montana? And what would Chief Joseph do in surrender?
The Nez Perces alternately call themselves the Nimí-ipuu (“The People”) and Iceyéeyenim mamáy’ac (“Children of the Coyote”). Once they had acquired horses, sometime in the early 1700s, they separated into bands that ranged through the Columbia Basin from the central and northern mountains of what would become Idaho and western Montana to the valleys of what would become northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. Born in early 1840, Joseph spent much time at the Christian mission in Lapwai (in present-day Idaho), was baptized, learned to speak English and studied the Bible until age 7 when his father, in anger over treaty terms, withdrew from Christian influence and reverted to the Nez Perce “Dreamer” faith, in which men and women lived from the bounty of the land, roamed freely throughout their territory and received guidance from spiritual visions. When he was around 11 years old, Joseph, following tradition in his tribe, went on a vision quest. By the time he returned to his village, he had received a spirit helper who gave him a song and power related to thunder, thus his name Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (roughly translated as “Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain”).
Fifteen-year-old Joseph rode with his father in 1855 to the council near the Walla Walla River organized by Governor Stevens in Washington Territory and Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon Territory. There he witnessed the first erosion of Columbia Basin Indian country and sovereign rule. “After the council was opened,” Joseph recalled some years later, “[Stevens] made known his heart. He said there were a great many white people in the country, and many more would come.”
“I think you intend to win our country,” Walla Walla headman Yellow Bird (or Yellow Serpent) told white officials. Palmer said the treaty would protect the Indians from those “whose hearts are bad” who were scheming “to get your horses.” Yellow Bird knew that Stevens, who was survey leader for a northern railroad route across the country, clearly wanted the Indian land cessions to aid the project. In the end, while other tribes saw erosion of their territories, the Nez Perces retained most of their lands, including the Wallowa Valley. Old Joseph, satisfied he still controlled the homeland, scrawled an awkward X on the treaty beside his name. Returning to the valley, he promptly found a piece of parchment 16 inches wide by 18 inches long and drew a map of his territory.
By 1863 young Joseph stood nearly 6 feet and weighed more than 200 pounds. He was strong and handsome. He parted his hair on the right, twisting it into braids, and swept his pompadour up and to the left, sometimes coating it with white powder to make it more prominent. Already he was stepping in his father’s tracks as spokesman for the Wallowa band.
That year the Nez Perces gathered at Lapwai in another council with federal Indian Affairs representatives to work out an agreement that would halt the march of white settlers and miners onto their lands. The council document, which became known among the Nez Perces as the “Thief Treaty,” led to the permanent fracturing of Nez Perce power.
Twenty-three-year-old Joseph rode with his father, his 20- year-old brother, Ollokot, and others from the Wallowa band to the treaty grounds, where they intended to make it clear that whites on Nez Perce land must leave. Although no settlers or miners had yet encroached upon the isolated Wallowa Valley, Joseph and his companions supported the other Nez Perce bands on whose land whites were already building cabins and tearing the ground as they dug for gold.
From the moment the council opened, the Nez Perce Dreamers faced trouble. White negotiators proposed trimming the reservation from nearly 12,000 square miles to less than 1,200 square miles, a reduction that included all of the Wallowa band’s territory. But the headmen had behind them some 3,000 members of the Nez Perce Nation. Unable to collectively bully the Indian leaders into signing a new treaty, the commissioners resorted to personal pressure. They adjourned the council and held private meetings with tribal headmen, starting with those who had indicated support for the government position—most of whom were Christian Nez Perces.
Talks resumed during the official council, but the real action occurred late into the night and early morning of June 4–5, 1863, when the Indians gathered at their own council fire in the center of their extended village. The smoke of their pipes drifted around the council lodge and into the night air as the debate began. It still wafted hours later when Big Thunder, according to eavesdropping Oregon cavalry Captain George Currey, “made a formal announcement of their determination to take no further part in the treaty.”
Currey and 20 Oregon cavalrymen rode to the council grounds after midnight on June 5. On seeing the fire still burning in the Nez Perce lodge, the captain and his troopers quietly moved closer, then watched and listened as the 53 Nez Perce headmen talked. After Big Thunder’s first formal comment, Currey sat in shocked silence as the Indian headman, “in an emotional manner, declared the Nez Perce nation dissolved.” The Dreamers from the anti-treaty faction and those supporting Lawyer and the pro-treaty Christian Nez Perces shook hands. Then, Currey later recalled, Big Thunder announced “with a kind but firm demeanor that they would be friends, but a distinct people.”
The powerful Nez Perce Nation had just split apart, but unlike the American republic even then embroiled in Civil War, the Nez Perce people would never fully reunite. “I withdrew my detachment,” Currey wrote in his official report, “having accomplished nothing but witnessing the extinguishment of the last council fires of the most powerful Indian nation on the sunset side of the Rocky Mountains.”
Even before that landmark tribal gathering Old Joseph and White Bird, the Nez Perce headman from Salmon River country (in present-day Idaho), had departed the council grounds. They did not agree with the treaty and by leaving would not be bound by it. In their culture a headman could negotiate only for his own band, not for people from another part of the tribe.
The headmen who put their names or marks on the 1863 treaty “sold what did not belong to them,” Joseph’s cousin Yellow Wolf said. Joseph put it another way: “Suppose a white man should come to me and say, ‘Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.’ I say to him, ‘No, my horses suit me; I will not sell them.’ Then he goes to my neighbor and says to him, ‘Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.’ My neighbor answers, ‘Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.’ The white man returns to me and says, ‘Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.’ If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they were bought.”
Old Joseph did not sign the Thief Treaty, and when he received a copy of it, he tore it to pieces. And that was not all he did. “In order to have all people understand how much land we owned,” Joseph later recalled, “my father planted poles around it.” Piling rocks into cairns and placing 10-foot-high poles in them along a high ridge above Minam Creek on the western edge of the Wallowa band lands, Old Joseph, like a mountain lion or a grizzly bear, again marked his territory, telling his sons as they helped him, “Inside is the home of my people—the white man may take the land outside. Inside this boundary all our people were born. It circles around the graves of our fathers, and we will never give up these graves to any man.”
Joseph did not witness the breakup of his nation. He had mounted his horse and begun the 75-mile ride back to the Wallowa Valley before that fateful tribal council started. By 1867 he had a new role. “My father had become blind and feeble,” he said, “He could no longer speak for his people. It was then I took my father’s place as chief.” It was four years later the dying Old Joseph warned his son of white men eager to grab the tribal homeland and demanded of him, “Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”
By then the decision was out of the younger man’s hands. On May 28, 1867, a month after ratification of the 1863 treaty, the U.S. General Land Office had officially included the Wallowa Valley in the public domain, thereby opening it to general settlement. The first white stockmen pushed cattle into the area in the spring of 1871.
Before his father’s death Joseph had spoken for him in council with government agents; after burial he wore the title Chief Joseph with a dignity and solemnity that belied his age. At 31, he was the youngest and least experienced of the Nez Perce leaders, but soon he would be catapulted onto a national stage, all due to the power and pull of a piece of land. “There is nothing should supersede it,” he told treaty officials. “There is nothing which can outstrip it. It is clothed with fruitfulness. In it are riches given me by my ancestors, and from that time up to the present I have loved the land and was thankful that it had been given me.”
Although some advocated violence, the young chief did not want blood spilled in his beloved Wallowa Valley and avoided sparking a war, while insisting the settlers who had moved in must leave. He maintained the position his late father had taken: “If we ever owned the land, we own it still, for we never sold it.”
Joseph led the Wallowa band through the quagmire of governmental negotiations, relying on diplomacy to preserve his homeland and in the process becoming the best known of the Nez Perce anti-treaty leaders. Federal investigators agreed with Joseph’s claim he had not relinquished the Wallowa Valley, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a June 1873 executive order that restored the valley to his people, and government officials recommended removal of encroaching settlers. The U.S. Congress, however, rescinded Grant’s order, and as a result settlers stayed and pressure mounted to relocate the Nez Perces, as had been done with dozens of other tribes.
General O.O. Howard wrote of his first encounter with the Nez Perce leader, in the spring of 1875 on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, northwest of the Wallowa Valley: “Joseph put his large black eyes on my face and maintained a fixed look for some time. It did not appear to me as an audacious stare; but I thought he was trying to open the windows of his heart to me.” Initially Howard supported Joseph’s claim to the Wallowa, writing: “I think it a great mistake to take from Joseph and his band of Nez Perce Indians that valley. The white people really do not want it.…Possibly Congress can be induced to let these really peaceable Indians have this poor valley for their own.”
While Howard may have considered the Wallowa Valley “poor,” Joseph saw it as a most special place. “[It] had always belonged to my father’s own people, and the other bands had never disputed our right to it,” he said. “Our fathers were born here. Here they lived, here they died, here are their graves. We will never leave them.”
The issue of removal of non-treaty Nez Perces centered on Joseph’s band. The chief’s oratorical ability, and his people’s wealth of cattle and horses, made him the lead Nez Perce spokesman and diplomat in the estimation of the whites. Frontier newspapers in Oregon and Idaho ascribed to Joseph an authority over all bands he simply did not have. Other tribesmen had a stake in the issue. Each band had its own headman and so retained autonomy. The tribe had occasionally designated one prominent man to speak for all bands, but it never recognized that individual as supreme over all others, as did the frontier military and popular press of the period.
The 1863 treaty provisions that affected Joseph’s people also required removal of Nez Perce bands under White Bird, Toohoolhoolzote and Looking Glass. On May 3, 1877, the military and the non-treaty Nez Perces convened yet another council. By its conclusion days later the decision was made: The bands had until mid-June to move permanently to the reservation centered at Lapwai, Idaho Territory.
Violence over the forced removal erupted in mid-June when warriors Shore Crossing, Red Moccasin Top and Swan Necklace attacked and killed several white settlers on the Salmon River in Idaho Territory. Days later, on June 17, 1877, U.S. volunteers and Nez Perce warriors fought the opening battle of the Nez Perce War at nearby White Bird Canyon. The Indians killed 34 soldiers, while the Nez Perce had three wounded.
That summer thousands of the Nez Perce people zigzagged across Idaho and Montana territories, mostly seeking to outrun pursuing federal soldiers, though warriors fought skirmishes and battles along the way. On July 11 in Idaho Territory the Nez Perces withstood a surprise attack by General Howard and again inflicted stiffer casualties on the soldiers in the Battle of the Clearwater. Chief Joseph joined other warriors in confronting the soldiers along a ridgeline, but recognizing the enemy’s superior numbers, he retreated to warn families in the village and prepare a withdrawal. In their rush to flee the people left behind many of their possessions. They crossed Lolo Pass and headed south through the Bitterroot Valley. On the morning of August 9 in western Montana Territory, Colonel John Gibbon attacked the Nez Perce encampment near the Big Hole River, killing or wounding dozens of tribal members. There Joseph played a vital role in controlling the Indian horse herd, which was essential for the people to maintain their flight. The soldiers suffered some 30 killed and 40 wounded. Gibbon did not pursue.
Between August 23 and September 7 in Yellowstone National Park the fleeing Nez Perces had several encounters with white visitors, killing two of them and holding one group of tourists hostage for three days. The Indians managed to stay one jump ahead of the soldiers, though. After leaving the park, they slipped through an Army juggernaut, crossed through Crow country—where they had thought they might find sanctuary—and pushed north toward Canada. There, they believed, they could join the great Lakota leader Sitting Bull.
But as Joseph and his young daughter caught horses early in the morning of September 30, Colonel Nelson Miles’ troopers attacked with a vengeance in what became known as the Battle of Bear’s Paw. Joseph put his daughter on a horse and sent her toward Canada, while he returned to defend the camp. Yellow Wolf watched as “hundreds of soldiers charging in two wide, circling wings…were surrounding our camp.” Shot in Head described the attack: “We rode the lead-cut air. Bullets were buzzing like summer flies.”
“I called my men to drive them back,” Chief Joseph said. “We fought at close range, not more than 20 steps apart.” Bullets flew in every direction, felling soldiers and Indians alike, including Joseph’s brother Ollokot, struck in the head by a soldier’s bullet. “The soldiers kept up a continuous fire,” Joseph recalled. “Six of my men were killed in one spot near me.”
By nightfall on the first day of battle all Nez Perce leaders except Joseph, Looking Glass and White Bird had been killed. For the next four days the Nez Perces held out against the besieging troops. White Bird and Looking Glass remained adamant against surrender. Then Looking Glass was shot and killed, becoming the last Nez Perce casualty of the battle and leaving only Joseph and White Bird to lead the tribe. Having tried for years to avoid war, and after enduring four months of constant movement that had debilitated his people, Joseph made a decision. “I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer; we had lost enough already,” he later recalled. “My people needed rest—we wanted peace.”
From the shelter pits, with his weary people around him, Joseph sent the message to Howard that became one of the most famous quotations of the Indian wars: “I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed.…The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death.…Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
Joseph’s surrender speech became the defining statement of his life and of his people. Relayed to Miles and Howard by two old Nez Perce men who scouted for the Army, the speech was recorded by the general’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood. After the scouts delivered his message, Joseph mounted a horse and rode toward the soldiers’ camp. He rested his Winchester carbine across the saddle pommel and clasped a gray blanket around his shoulders. Face stoic, his long hair hanging in two braids over his chest and pompadour tied up with a piece of otter fur, he wore buckskin moccasins, leggings and war shirt, the latter ripped and torn by bullets. Welts on his wrists and forehead marked where bullets had grazed him. Joseph’s most loyal warriors walked beside him as he approached camp and extended the Winchester to Colonel Miles. “We could have escaped from Bear’s Paw Mountain if we had left our wounded, old women and children behind,” Joseph later said. “We were unwilling to do this.” Of the 700 Nez Perces who had camped along Snake Creek near the Bear’s Paw Mountains, 448 became Miles’ prisoners of war, 25 died on the battlefield and the remainder, many following White Bird, made their way toward Canada.
Joseph second-guessed his decision to surrender. “General Miles had promised that we might return to our own country with what stock we had left,” the chief said. “ I thought we could start again. I believed [him], or I never would have surrendered.” Instead Joseph and those Nez Perces who followed him into surrender were removed to Fort Keogh, Montana Territory, then down the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory. In November they were sent farther downriver to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Fort Leavenworth defined “hellhole” for Chief Joseph and his desperate, suffering people. In a camp two miles from the fort, situated between the Missouri River and a lagoon, the Nez Perces suffered from fevers lurking in contaminated water and from the early summer plague of mosquitoes that spread malaria through the “miserable, helpless, emaciated specimens of humanity,” wrote a contributor in the monthly journal Council Fire and Arbitrator. “I cannot tell you how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth,” Joseph later said. “The Great Spirit Chief who rules above seemed to be looking some other way and did not see what was being done to my people.”
On July 21, 1878, the Nez Perces, now under jurisdiction of the federal Office of Indian Affairs, were herded onto railroad cars and shipped to Baxter Springs, Kan., for settlement on a portion of the Quapaw Reservation. At Baxter Springs many others fell desperately ill with malaria, and with no quinine for treatment more than a quarter of the band perished. “It was worse to die there than to die fighting in the mountains,” Joseph recalled. Indian Affairs Commissioner Ezra A. Hayt, a 55-year-old New Yorker, met with Joseph in October 1878, and the two rode across southern Kansas and northeastern Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in search of a better place for the tribe. Thus, in June 1879 the Nez Perces moved to northeastern Indian Territory, where the red soil did little to nurture their souls. They called it Eeikish Pah (“The Hot Place”).
Joseph, who had told Nelson Miles and O.O. Howard he would fight no more, turned to the only weapons left to him: oratory and diplomacy. He sent his first petition seeking relief for the Nez Perces in December 1877, appealed to Commissioner Hayt in the fall of 1878 and in early 1879 took his cause to Washington, D.C. There Joseph stepped up to the podium seeking justice and reform, and for the rest of his life he would remain relentless in the pursuit of better conditions for his people and a return to the Wallowa Valley. Aware of the chief’s unrelenting campaign, Howard encouraged him, “You, Joseph, will show yourself a truly great man, and your people can never be blotted out.”
Joseph lobbied Congress and presidents, military commanders and Indian Affairs officials to return to his homeland, winning his battle in the court of public opinion by enlisting the support of Christians and Indian reformers. Agents serving the Nez Perces took up their cause, but it was the 1880 promotion of Nelson Miles to brigadier general and his assignment as commander of the Department of Columbia that made it possible for the Nez Perces to return to the Columbia Basin. Miles backed Chief Joseph’s claim that the Indian surrender entitled them to again live in their homeland.
In May 1884 the U.S. Senate approved an appropriation bill that would repatriate the Nez Perces. It took nearly a year for the federal order, issued on April 29, 1885, that sent the 268 survivors home. But not all would go to Idaho. “When finally released from bondage,” as Yellow Wolf put it, those who endorsed the Christian religion would settle at Lapwai in Idaho Territory, while those who adhered to the Dreamer faith would be sent to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington Territory. The question an interpreter asked, Yellow Wolf said, was, “Lapwai and be Christian, or Colville and just be yourself?” Only Joseph had no choice. He would be sent to Colville.
In 1887, when Congress approved the Dawes Act that apportioned tribal lands to individual Indians, some Nez Perces at Colville took advantage of the provisions and returned to Lapwai for acreage, but Joseph and his most steadfast supporters did not. Joseph held firm to his claim on Wallowa, believing he would one day be allowed to resettle in the land of his younger days. “Never for a moment did his heart turn from his old home to the new one,” missionary Kate McBeth recalled. “The grave of his father was there.”
Joseph continued his efforts to return to the Oregon valley of his childhood. In 1903 he presented his case for the Wallowa Valley over a shared meal of bison with President Theodore Roosevelt. He appealed to residents and university students in Seattle. He had backing from influential men who admired his grit and determination, but with his goal unachieved, Joseph died on September 21, 1904, in his lodge at Colville.
A regular Wild West contributor and the executive director of Western Writers of America, Candy Moulton is a lifetime member of the Nez Perce Trail Foundation [www.nezperce trail.net] and author of the Spur Award–winning biography Chief Joseph: Guardian of the People, which is recommended for further reading along with Let Me Be Free: The Nez Perce Tragedy, by David Lavender; Nez Perce Summer, 1877, by Jerome A. Greene; Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877, by Bruce Hampton; and The Flight of the Nez Perce, by Mark H. Brown.
Originally published in the April 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
