Chief Joseph was a Native American leader of the Wallowa band, Nez Perce tribe. He rose to national prominence after organizing resistance to efforts by the United States government to move the Nez Perce away from their traditional lands in northeast Oregon. Despite his ultimate failure, Joseph was praised far and wide for his innovative military tactics and his initial success against superior numbers. Upon his retirement from military action, his star continued to rise as he was celebrated for his eloquence and dignity.
Joseph was born Hinmatóowyalahtqit (“Thunder rolling down the Mountain”) in early March 1840. His father, Tuekakas, was the chieftain of the Wallowa Nez Perce, with its traditional homeland in the Wallowa River watershed of the Columbia Plateau. The United States government regarded the Nez Perce as comparatively “civilized” after receiving reports about them from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
By the 1850s, the relationship between the Nez Perce and white settlers had soured, as the previous two decades had seen a gradual encroachment of farming and mining interests as Oregon moved closer to statehood. Seeking to head off the inevitable, Joseph the Elder was part of a Nez Perce delegation that negotiated the transfer of lands and formation of a reservation. Known as the Walla Walla Treaty, this 1855 agreement served as a contract between the tribe and the federal government. However, when gold was discovered in 1863, white settlers violated the treaty, flooding onto the reservation.
During the next eight years, the Nez Perce were consumed by internal turmoil, as various leaders and bands quarreled over whether they should accept treaty modifications or resist relocation efforts. In 1871, Joseph took over leadership of the Wallowa from his father, becoming the leading voice in the debate. A tenuous agreement maintained peace for the next six years, but increased white immigration led the United States to pursue another relocation in 1877, and General Oliver Otis Howard was tasked with moving the tribe to a new reservation in Idaho.
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce led his people on an epic march in 1877 to resist U.S. efforts to force the Nez Perce onto a reservation in Idaho. Acting with great resilience and composure, Joseph kept his people from being captured for months until starvation and exposure forced his surrender. This famous photograph of Chief Joseph was taken ca. 1875 by William H. Jackson. (National Archives)
Reportedly, Joseph was one of the few chieftains who advocated for peaceful acquiescence, a position that became moot when several altercations resulted in bloodshed. At that point, a consortium of band chieftains decided that they would leave northeastern Idaho and strike out toward Montana Territory, seeking to enlist the help of the Crow tribe. Although he is now popularly viewed as the leader of this effort, Joseph was one of six to ten chieftains who made decisions collectively. This cabal included White Bird, Toohoolhoolzote, and Looking Glass from the Nez Perce, as well as Bald Head and Red Echo of the Palouse tribe, an offshoot of the Yakama Nation that had also seen a reduction of their lands.
Pursued by General Howard and the U.S. Cavalry, Joseph and his allies set out in June 1877 with a force of more than 750, although many of these were not warriors. They traveled through the neck of Idaho in July, and then southwest along the border of Montana Territory until they reached Yellowstone in August. Turning north, they crossed the prairies before reaching the Bear Paw Mountains at the end of September. Neither the Crow nor the Sioux offered assistance, and the move north across Montana signaled a shift in strategy. Their goal was to seek political asylum at Sitting Bull’s camp in Canada. During the nearly 1,200-mile trip, a number of skirmishes and seven battles were fought, culminating in a five-day affair at the Bear Paw Mountains. Although it has become known as the Nez Perce War, it was really a game of hide and seek. The U.S. Cavalry attempted to locate and engage the rear guard of the combined Nez Perce/Palouse forces as the bulk of the indigenous encampment moved from one location to the next.
During this three- to four-month series of engagements, Howard sent numerous dispatches back to Washington, D.C., messages filled with praise not only for the strategic and tactical mastery exhibited by the Nez Perce, but also what he viewed as admirable restraint in warfare. Daily newspaper stories covered the retreat, singling out Chief Joseph as the leader and turning him into an overnight sensation as a romantic hero. By the time the entire Nez Perce force was brought to bay just forty miles short of the Canadian border, Joseph had already become a Hannibal-like figure, a distinction that was not only manufactured but distorted, as modern historians have largely concluded that Looking Glass was the primary military architect.
After five days of intermittent sieges punctuated by occasional skirmishes, Chief Joseph and the other chieftains surrendered on October 5. It was in this moment that he cemented his legendary status, propelling his star into the firmament of American history. At the surrender ceremony, he is reported to have made the following speech:
The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; 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. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.
Controversy surrounds exactly how much the interpreter, C. E. S. Wood, embellished Joseph’s words. Regardless, the speech hit a chord with a nation that, in some small way, was beginning to comprehend the excesses of Manifest Destiny. With most of the chieftains dead, and White Bird in exile in Canada, Chief Joseph was now the sole face of the Native American resistance, dubbed the “Red Napoleon” for his supposed skills as a military leader. He was also idolized as a martyr in some quarters, and even the New York Times ran an editorial expressing the position that the Nez Perce never should have been forced to relocate.
William Tecumseh Sherman was one of Joseph’s greatest supporters, noting both the restraint and skill of the Nez Perce warriors: “They abstained from scalping: let captive women go free: did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families, which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines, and field fortifications.” Sherman’s professed admiration for the Nez Perce contrasts sharply with his own treatment of prisoners of war. He ordered that the able-bodied male prisoners should march overland to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to be housed for months in a tent camp along a river bottom during the malarial summer season. From here, the Nez Perce were sent to Oklahoma, where they were forced to live in equally adverse conditions.
Joseph now turned to diplomacy, and due to his fame was able to gain an audience with both President Hayes and the U.S. Congress in 1879. After six more years of lobbying, the political climate allowed for all parties to permit the Nez Perce to return to the Pacific Northwest. Although they were not allowed to resettle their native Wallowa River Valley, they were given a reservation in the north of Washington Territory. Joseph made several more trips to Washington, D.C. to advocate for greater rights and freedoms for his people, and even met with President Teddy Roosevelt. Although his cause was met with much sympathy, he was never able to secure the repatriation of his people to Oregon. He died in 1904, apocryphally of a broken heart from his failure to return his people to their rightful home.
Chief Joseph is one of very few nineteenth-century Native Americans to be viewed sympathetically by a population obsessed with the conquest of the frontier. In a nation fully committed to the notion of Manifest Destiny, figures of indigenous resistance were typically demonized as savages and obstacles to be overcome. Joseph’s legend thus serves as a counternarrative to the often openly racist views of the time. The Nez Perce were already considered to be more civilized, and in the praise heaped upon Joseph by General Howard and others he became a romantic symbol of resistance in a world where the frontier was rapidly evaporating. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that he would become the subject of numerous books, poems, and eventually songs and films. Two memoirs of the Nez Perce War were published, one by General Howard only two years after the surrender, and the other by Yellow Wolf, as told to Lucullus McWhorter during annual interviews between 1907 and 1935. The most enduring words, however, come from Chief Joseph himself, as his surrender speech, particularly its conclusion, “I will fight no more forever,” have long outlived their speaker, becoming a banner for the concept of dignity in defeat.
Andrew Howe
See also Crazy Horse; Geronimo
Further Reading
Beal, Merrill. 2000. I Will Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Minthorn, Phil E. “Chief Joseph.” Indigenous People’s Literature website. Available online at http://www.indians.org/welker/joseph.htm.
Nerburn, Kent. 2005. Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy. New York: HarperCollins.
West, Elliott. 2011. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chief Joseph—Primary Document
“Chief Joseph, a Notable Figure in Washington” (1900)
While nineteenth-century Americans typically vilified and dehumanized Native Americans, there were rare instances when notable indigenous leaders were romanticized. This piece from the New York Tribune depicts Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce as a “noble savage”: a man of the utmost honor and morality, preserved in a state of innocence by his isolation from the corrupting influences of civilization. While steeped in cultural prejudice, the article presents Chief Joseph as the tragic victim of greedy settlers and Manifest Destiny. In doing so, it transforms a flesh-and-blood historical figure into a legend: the last of a vanishing race of noble warriors.
Chief Joseph has lost much. His tribe, through the greed of the white man, were hunted from their homes, and their present holdings are not those handed down to them by their fathers, but lands allotted the tribe by the Government. Conventions made have been repeatedly broken, and there must be in the heart of this proud descendant of a noble tribe a feeling of bitterness and chagrin; but it is doubtless some compensation to know that when he was weighed in the balance he was not found wanting, and that he succeeded, misrepresented and misquoted as he often was, in winning the regard, respect, and esteem of his old enemies.
Chief Joseph commanded in that war which the official accounts term “one of the most extraordinary Indian wars of which there is any record.” The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise. They abstained from scalping, let the captive women go free, did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families, which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines and field fortifications, and one thinks of him at that time, 1877, as a middle aged man and now as a patriarch. This veteran warrior is, on the contrary, just turned fifty, his face is the face of a man in the prime of his life, his head sits proudly on his shoulders, and his eyes look into the eyes of his white brother with truth and sincerity as of old. He wears, as a rule, the garb of civilization, but has always at hand his chief’s costume, and is a brave figure in his paint and feathers.
Chief Joseph, it will be remembered, belonged to the non-treaty band of the Nez Percés, which occupied the Wallowa Reservation in Oregon, and long ago was charged with opposing the introduction of schools on his reservations. His reasons, however, even from a civilized point of view, were logical, and should furnish a hint to those religious sects who too often occupy themselves with the motes in the eyes of their savage brothers without concern for the beams in their own eyes. When interrogated by the commission regarding his reported opposition to the introduction of schools Chief Joseph said:
“No, we do not want schools or schoolhouses on the Wallowa Reservation.”
“Why do you not want schools?” asked the Commissioner.
“They will teach us to have churches.”
“And why do you not want churches?”
“They teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do on the Nez Percés Reservation and other places. We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”
When Chief Joseph and his band finally consented to move from the country granted to them by the Government but coveted by white settlers the Chief said finely:
“I said in my heart that, rather than have war, I would give up my country. I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people.”
Following this, when it seemed as if he could not keep his covenant, because the young men of the tribe, chafing under the injustice, longed to fight, he rode through the streets of the village, a loaded revolver in each hand, threatening to shoot the first one of his warriors who resisted the Government. After the war Joseph and his people were imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, where they endured much suffering and where many of them died.
“I cannot tell how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth,” said Joseph. “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.”
Source: “Gossip of the Capital. Chief Joseph a Notable Figure in Washington. His Remarkable Record—Governor Bradbury’s Prescription—A Saddened Judge.” The New-York Tribute Illustrated Supplement. (April 1, 1900).