Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph was born on March 3, 1840, in the Wallowa Valley of what is now northeastern Oregon, near the Wallowa River ^[1]. His Nez Perce name was Hinmatoowyalahtqit, usually rendered in English as Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt and translated as Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain ^[2]. Americans came to call him Joseph the Younger, after his father, a respected leader known as Old Joseph or Tuekakas, who had accepted Christian baptism from missionaries in the late 1830s ^[1].

The Wallowa band belonged to the larger Nez Perce nation, whose homeland spread across the plateau country where Oregon, Washington, and Idaho now meet. The people fished salmon, dug camas root, and bred the horses for which they became famous, moving seasonally through valleys and high meadows ^[3]. Joseph grew up during a period of accelerating change. The 1855 treaty negotiated at Walla Walla recognized a large Nez Perce reservation that included the Wallowa country, and his father signed it. Then gold was discovered on Nez Perce land in 1860, settlers and miners poured in, and federal commissioners returned in 1863 with a new treaty that shrank the reservation by about ninety percent ^[1].

Old Joseph refused to sign the 1863 agreement, which left the Wallowa Valley outside the reduced reservation. His refusal split the Nez Perce into treaty and non-treaty factions, a division that shaped the rest of his son's life ^[2]. Before his death in 1871, the elder Joseph reportedly urged his son never to sell the bones of his ancestors. The young man who inherited leadership of the Wallowa band that year took the charge seriously.

Anyone asking who was Chief Joseph in the early 1870s would have found a band leader in his thirties trying to hold his ground through argument rather than arms. He pressed federal officials to honor his band's claim to the Wallowa Valley, and for a time he seemed to succeed. In 1873 President Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order setting aside part of the valley for the Wallowa Nez Perce ^[4]. Settler pressure in Oregon proved stronger than the order, and Grant reversed it in 1875, opening the valley to homesteading ^[4].

Matters came to a head in 1877. General Oliver Otis Howard, commanding the Army's Department of the Columbia, met with the non-treaty bands and gave them thirty days to move onto the reduced reservation in Idaho or face military force ^[1]. Joseph argued against war. He knew the numbers: his band counted a few hundred people, many of them children and elders, against the resources of the United States Army. Reluctantly, the non-treaty bands began gathering their herds and moving toward the reservation.

The decision was taken out of his hands. In mid June 1877, a group of young warriors from another band, angered by earlier killings of Nez Perce people that had gone unpunished, attacked settlers along the Salmon River ^[3]. Retaliation was certain. Joseph joined the other non-treaty leaders, among them Looking Glass, White Bird, and his own younger brother Ollokot, as roughly 750 men, women, and children set out to escape the Army, driving some 2,000 horses with them ^[2].

The Nez Perce War lasted from June to October 1877 and covered a route of about 1,170 miles through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana ^[5]. The first major engagement, at White Bird Canyon in Idaho on June 17, ended in a startling Nez Perce victory: 34 soldiers died against no Nez Perce dead ^[3]. Further fights followed at the Clearwater River in July and at the Big Hole in Montana on August 9 and 10, where a dawn attack by Colonel John Gibbon's troops killed dozens of Nez Perce, many of them women and children, before the warriors counterattacked and covered the camp's escape ^[5].

Newspaper readers in the East followed the campaign and credited Joseph with masterminding it. The reality was more collective. Military decisions among the Nez Perce were made in council, and war leaders such as Looking Glass, Ollokot, and the older strategist Toohoolhoolzote directed much of the fighting, while Joseph's recognized responsibility was the care and movement of the camp, the families, and the herds ^[2]. Historians have long noted that the image of Joseph as a lone military genius, sometimes called the Red Napoleon by contemporary journalists, was largely a creation of the press ^[6].

The fleeing bands crossed the newly created Yellowstone National Park, alarming tourists, then turned north toward the Canadian border, hoping to join Sitting Bull's Lakota, who had taken refuge there after the Little Bighorn. They nearly made it. On September 30, 1877, troops under Colonel Nelson A. Miles struck the Nez Perce camp at Snake Creek near the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, about forty miles from the border ^[5]. Ollokot, Looking Glass, and Toohoolhoolzote all died in the siege that followed. After five days of fighting in cold and snow, with the remaining people freezing and starving, Joseph rode out to surrender on October 5, 1877 ^[1].

The surrender produced the words most often attached to Chief Joseph's name. As recorded by Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, an aide to General Howard, Joseph's message ended: 'From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever' ^[6]. Scholars have debated how faithfully Wood transcribed or reconstructed the speech, but the account was published within weeks and fixed Joseph in the American imagination ^[6]. About 418 Nez Perce surrendered at Bear Paw, while a group led by White Bird slipped away to Canada during the siege ^[5].

Both Miles and Howard indicated the Nez Perce would be returned to the Idaho reservation. General William Tecumseh Sherman overruled them. The prisoners were shipped first to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then in 1878 to the Quapaw reservation and later the Ponca reserve in Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma ^[1]. The exiles called the hot lowland country Eeikish Pah, the hot place. Malaria and other diseases killed many of them there, including a high proportion of the children born in exile ^[2].

Joseph spent these years as an advocate. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1879, met President Rutherford B. Hayes, and addressed a gathering of officials and journalists. An account of his views appeared that year in the North American Review under the title 'An Indian's View of Indian Affairs,' a sustained argument that his people had never sold the Wallowa country and asked only to be treated under the same law as white men ^[7].

Public sympathy, kept alive by Joseph's appeals and by officers such as Miles who supported him, eventually forced a partial reversal of the exile. In 1885 the government allowed the surviving Nez Perce to leave Indian Territory. About 118 who agreed to Christian oversight went to the Lapwai reservation in Idaho, while roughly 150 others, Joseph among them, were sent to the Colville Indian Reservation in north central Washington, far from both Idaho and the Wallowa Valley ^[1].

At Colville, Joseph settled at Nespelem and continued to press his case. He returned to the Wallowa Valley in 1899 and again in 1900, hoping to buy back land for his band, but local settlers refused to sell and a federal inspector recommended against relocation ^[4]. He also remained a public figure in a country that had begun to romanticize the frontier it had just closed. He attended the 1903 dedication ceremonies in New York for Grant's Tomb era commemorations, met President Theodore Roosevelt, and appeared with Buffalo Bill Cody, all while repeating the same request for his homeland ^[2].

Joseph died at Nespelem on the Colville Indian Reservation on September 21, 1904. The reservation physician attributed his death to a broken heart, a phrase that traveled widely in the press ^[1]. He was buried at Nespelem, where his grave remains, still outside the valley where he was born.

Details of Joseph's family life are less documented than his public career, but the outlines are clear. Following Nez Perce custom for a leading man, he had more than one wife over his lifetime, and he raised children, several of whom died young, including during the 1877 war and the Indian Territory exile ^[2]. His daughter Kapkap Ponmi, known in English as Sound of Running Feet, became separated from him during the Bear Paw siege and escaped to Canada with White Bird's group ^[3].

His closest political and personal partner was his younger brother Ollokot, a celebrated buffalo hunter and war leader who commanded the young men of the Wallowa band. Ollokot's death at Bear Paw on September 30, 1877, removed the band's principal fighting leader and left Joseph nearly alone among the senior men to negotiate the surrender ^[5].

Though raised partly within the mission Christianity his father had once accepted, Joseph followed the Dreamer faith associated with the prophet Smohalla, which held that the earth should not be plowed, sold, or divided ^[4]. That conviction ran through everything he said about the Wallowa country. In photographs taken by Edward Curtis and others late in his life, he appears as visitors described him: reserved, courteous, and unyielding on the single question that mattered to him.

Any honest list of Chief Joseph achievements begins not with battlefield command but with endurance and articulate protest. He kept several hundred civilians moving and largely intact across four states under military pursuit, negotiated a surrender that he understood as a promise of return, and then spent 27 years holding the United States to account for breaking it ^[1]. His 1879 statement in the North American Review remains one of the most quoted Native American texts of the nineteenth century, taught in histories of federal Indian policy ^[7].

His name is written across the Northwest. The town of Joseph, Oregon, sits in the Wallowa Valley, Chief Joseph Dam spans the Columbia River in Washington, and the Nez Perce National Historical Park preserves sites of the 1877 war, including the Big Hole and Bear Paw battlefields ^[5]. The Nez Perce (Nee-Me-Poo) National Historic Trail, established by Congress in 1986, follows the route of the retreat ^[5].

A reliable Chief Joseph biography must separate the man from the myth the newspapers built, yet the myth itself is part of his story. Reporters cast him as a military mastermind; later historians restored credit to the council of leaders who fought the war. What survives scrutiny is the record of a leader who argued for peace, protected his people in war, and never stopped asking for the return of a valley. Among the basic Chief Joseph facts, one carries the most weight: he was never allowed to live in the Wallowa Valley again, and his descendants at Colville and Lapwai still tell the story he refused to let die ^[2].