In shelter pits that had been hastily dug into the prairie of the Northern Plains, on October 5, 1877, with his weary, wounded people around him, Nez Perce Chief Joseph made his decision: “Tell General Howard I know his heart. I am tired of fighting.”
Joseph’s decision came after a months-long flight as the Nez Perce families attempted to avoid forced settlement onto a reservation in Idaho.
When I first visited the Bear Paw Battlefield near Chinook, Montana, on October 5, 1998, a cold wind was sweeping across the northern plains. At the invitation of the Nez Perce elder holding a smoking calumet, several men and one old woman took their places in a circle. Younger Indian women pulled brightly colored shawls close to their bodies and formed a semi-circle around those seated. The elder motioned to those of us who were not Nez Perce and said, “Join us. We welcome you.”
As we moved closer, the crisp air carried the hint of snow forty miles to the north in Canada. From the hill where we stood, it seemed so close to that border, yet for the Nez Perce people who had been at this site near the Bear’s Paw Mountains of northern Montana Territory in 1877, that distance meant an eternity in exile and the demise of their free-ranging lives.
It was here that Chief Joseph spoke the words for which he is remembered:
“From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
But there had been more to the speech, delivered to two Nez Perces who relayed it to General Oliver O. Howard and Lieutenant Colonel Nelson Miles, leaders of a great federal army that had just chased Joseph and the Nez Perces 1,500 miles from the Wallowa Valley of Oregon across Idaho, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park.
“Tell General Howard I know his heart,” Joseph said. “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. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.”
“Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad.”
What had brought Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces to that wind-swept battlefield in northern Montana?
The Nez Perces were an adaptive, progressive tribe responsible for development of the Appaloosa horse and reliant upon free-flowing streams, native plants, and wildlife herds for their food and shelter.
In 1831, they sent emissaries to St Louis, inviting Christian missionaries into their land to bring the power they associated with the Bible. Nine years later, in the high Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon, a Nez Perce woman gave birth to the child who would become Chief Joseph.
Joseph lived at a Christian mission, learned to speak English, and studied the Bible until age seven when his father withdrew from Christian influence and reverted to traditional Nez Perce belief: the “Dreamer” religion in which men and women lived from the bounty of the land, roamed freely throughout their territory, and received guidance from spiritual visions.
Joseph was fifteen when his father signed a treaty that he believed preserved the tribal homeland. The older man prepared a parchment map and set stakes around the Wallowa Valley to signify his claim to it. Eight years later government officials presented to him a new treaty that significantly reduced the size of the reservation and took from the tribe Joseph’s homeland. His father refused to sign that treaty as did several other Nez Perce headmen. These leaders, all Dreamers, now “non-treaty” chiefs, split their own nation in two -- at a time when civil war embroiled the Americans -- leaving only the “treaty chiefs,” all Christian believers, to sign the document.
For the Nez Perce no headman’s individual decisions bound any other headman, but federal officials said the signatures of the treaty chiefs obligated all Nez Perce leaders to the 1863 document’s provisions. That meant, without their consent, the “Dreamers” lost much of the tribal ground.
In 1876, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked a much larger force of Lakota and Cheyenne Indians camped along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. The killing of Custer and his troopers led to a nationwide demand to force all American Indians onto reservations and this outcry set the stage for the events of 1877 that made Joseph a nationally known figure.
Following conflict in Idaho, the Nez Perce refused to go to the new reservation. During four months of flight to elude various army units, Joseph emerged in the nation’s newspapers, and to the pursuing military commanders and troops, as the supreme war leader of the Nez Perces. Then, and for fifty years afterward, he was recognized as the great Nez Perce war chief who had -- with babies, women, and old people in tow -- out-foxed, out-maneuvered, and out-fought a great federal army.
In reality, Joseph was not a war chief; that task fell to his younger brother and other Nez Perces including White Bird and Looking Glass. Instead, he had a far more important role during the hegira: he became the guardian of the people.
Many events led to the Nez Perce movement from the Wallowa Valley and their subsequent trail across Idaho, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park to the Bear’s Paw, where they camped on September 29, 1877, believing they had out-run the Army and were close to sanctuary in Canada, just 40 miles to the north. They were wrong.
Hundreds Of Soldiers Charging
At Bear’s Paw Lieutenant Colonel Nelson Miles’s troopers attacked with a vengeance. Yellow Wolf watched “hundreds of soldiers charging in two wide, circling wings. They were surrounding our camp.” Nez Perce warrior Shot in Head noted, “We rode the lead-cut air. Bullets were buzzing like summer flies.”
“I called my men to drive them back. We fought at close range, not more than twenty steps apart,” Joseph said. Some soldiers fell in the Indian camp and the Nez Perces took their guns and ammunition as they repulsed three separate onslaughts by the troopers.
Bullets struck soldiers and Indians alike. “The soldiers kept up a continuous fire,” Joseph said. “Six of my men were killed in one spot near me.”
By nightfall on the first day of the attack 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 troops, but they faced tough decisions.
“We could have escaped from Bear Paw Mountain if we had left our wounded, old women, and children behind,” Joseph said. “We were unwilling to do this.”
White Bird remained adamant against surrender. Looking Glass told Joseph he knew about “a man of two faces and two tongues. If you surrender you will be sorry.”
“The white captain has made good talk all right,” Joseph said. “Many of our people are out in the hills, naked and freezing. The women are suffering with cold, the children crying with the chilly dampness of the shelter pits. For myself I do not care. It is for them I am going to surrender.”
The People Could Not Suffer Any Longer
The impasse continued for another three days. Looking Glass was killed when a soldier bullet struck him in the head. White Bird remained adamant against surrender, but Joseph said, “I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer; we had lost enough already. My people needed rest. We wanted peace.”
In the shelter pits, with his weary, wounded people around him, Joseph made his decision. “Tell General Howard I know his heart. I am tired of fighting. 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.
Of the seven hundred souls who had camped along Snake Creek near the Bear’s Paw Mountains at noon on September 29, 1877, Miles eventually held 448 as prisoners of war. Twenty-five had died on the battlefield and the remainder had made their way toward Canada with White Bird, one of them was Chief Joseph’s daughter.
Although promised they would be allowed to return to Idaho, instead Joseph and the people who followed him in surrender, were removed to Fort Keough, Montana, then down the Missouri to Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota, before being again sent downriver to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
“I cannot tell you how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth,” Joseph said. “The Great Spirit Chief who rules above seemed to be looking some other way. He did not see what was being done to my people.”
On July 21, 1878, the Nez Perces, now under jurisdiction of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, were herded onto railroad cars and shipped to Baxter Springs, Kansas, for settlement on a portion of the Quapaw Reservation. At Baxter Springs, many fell desperately ill with malaria and with no quinine for treatment, more than a quarter of the band perished. Joseph said, “It was worse to die there than to die fighting in the mountains.”
Joseph Continues To Fight With Words
Joseph, who had told Nelson Miles and General Howard he would fight no more, continued to fight with the only weapon left to him. He sent his first petition seeking relief for the Nez Perces in December, 1877; appealed to Indian Commissioner E. A. Hayt in the fall of 1878; and in early 1879, took his cause to Washington, D.C. There he stepped up to the podium in the court of public opinion seeking justice and reform, and for the rest of his life would remain relentless in the pursuit of better conditions for his people and a return to the Wallowa Valley.
Of his unrelenting campaign, General Howard eventually told him, “You, Joseph, will show yourself a truly great man, and your people can never be blotted out.”
Joseph took advantage of his notoriety from the war and used his skills as orator and diplomat to gain support. His account of the injustices his people had endured since the 1863 treaty that had deposed them from the Wallowa Valley gained widespread sympathy from the press and the general public.
Finally, opposition from representatives in western states fell aside and 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 to the Columbia Basin. Some settled in Lapwai, Idaho, but Chief Joseph and his closest supporters were sent to the Colville Reservation in Washington.
Joseph held firm to his claim on the Wallowa Valley. In 1903, he presented his case for the Wallowa Valley over a shared meal of buffalo 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 the goal unachieved, Joseph died on September 21, 1904, in his lodge at Colville, where he is buried.
Yet his words live on: “Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars. We shall all be alike – brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers’ hands upon the face of the earth.”
The gun Chief Joseph surrendered to General Miles October 5, 1877, is now on display at the Missouri Breaks Interpretive Center in Fort Benton, Montana.
Candy Moulton is the author of Chief Joseph: Guardian of the People. She can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
