Chief Joseph

The Nez Perce under Chief Joseph and Looking Glass cross with their Palus allies from Idaho over Lolo Pass into Montana Territory, traveling southeast, dipping into Yellowstone National Park and then back north into Montana, roughly eleven hundred and seventy miles (eighteen hundred and eighty kilometers).

They attempt to seek refuge with the Crow Nation, but, rebuffed by the Crow, ultimately decide to try to reach safety in Canada.

A small number of Nez Perce fighters, probably fewer than two hundred, defeat or hold off larger forces of the U.S. Army in several battles.

The most notable is the two-day Battle of the Big Hole in southwestern Montana territory, a battle with heavy casualties on both sides, including many women and children on the Nez Perce side.

Until the Big Hole, the Nez Perce had held the naive view that they could end the war with the U.S. on terms favorable, or at least acceptable, to themselves.

Afterwards, the war "increased in ferocity and tempo. From then on all white men were bound to be their enemies and yet their own fighting power had been severely reduced." (Beal, Merrill D. I Will Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War. Seattle: U of WA Press, 1963, p. 130)

The war comes to an end when the Nez Perce stop to make camp and rest on the prairie adjacent to Snake Creek in the foothills of the north slope of the Bear’s Paw Mountains in Montana Territory, only forty miles (sixty-four kilometers) from the Canadian border.

They believed that they had shaken off Howard and their pursuers, but they are unaware that the recently promoted Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles in command of the newly created District of the Yellowstone had been dispatched from the Tongue River Cantonment to find and intercept them.

Miles leads a combined force made up of units of the Fifth Infantry, and Second Cavalry and the deceased George Armstrong Custer's former command, the Seventh Cavalry.

Accompanying the troops are Lakota and Cheyenne Indian Scouts, many of whom had fought against the Army only a year prior during the Sioux War.

They make a surprise attack upon the Nez Perce camp on the morning of September 30.

After a three-day standoff Howard arrives with his command, on October 3 and the stalemate is broken.

Chief Joseph surrenders on October 5, 1877, and declares in his famous surrender speech that he will "fight no more forever."

In total, the Nez Perce have engaged two thousand American soldiers of different military units, as well as their Indian auxiliaries.

They have fought "eighteen engagements, including four major battles and at least four fiercely contested skirmishes." (Josephy, Alvin (2007). Nez Perce Country, p. 632-633. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.)

Many people praise the Nez Perce for their exemplary conduct and skilled fighting ability.

The Montana newspaper New North-West states: "Their warfare since they entered Montana has been almost universally marked so far by the highest characteristics recognized by civilized nations.”

Howard and Miles had promised Joseph during the surrender negotiations that the Nez Perce would be allowed to return to their reservation in Idaho.

However, the commanding general of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, overrules them and directs that they not be allowed to return to the reservation.

"I believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered," Chief Joseph will say afterward.

Miles marches his captives two hundred and sixty-five miles to the Tongue River Cantonment in southeast Montana Territory, where they arrive on October 23, 1877, and are held until October 31, when the able-bodied warriors are marched out to Fort Buford, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers.

On November 1, the ill, wounded, and women and children set out for Fort Buford in fourteen Mackinaw boats.

The surrendered Nez Perce are made to live in a swampy bottomland over the protests to Sherman by the commander of the Fort.

“It was horrible,” a writer said, “the 400 miserable, helpless, emaciated specimens of humanity, subjected for months to the malarial atmosphere of the river bottom.” (Josephy, Alvin (2007). Nez Perce Country. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.)

Tensions between Nez Perce and white settlers rise in 1876 and 1877.

General Oliver Howard calls a council in May 1877 and orders the non-treaty bands to move to the reservation, setting an impossible deadline of thirty days.

Howard humiliates the Nez Perce by jailing their old leader, Toohoolhoolzote, who speaks against moving to the reservation.

The other Nez Perce leaders then agree to the move, including Chief Joseph, who considers military resistance to be futile and reports as ordered to Fort Lapwai, Idaho.

The Nez Perce had been coerced by the United States federal government at the Walla Walla Council in 1855 into giving up their ancestral lands and moving to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon Territory with the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla tribes.

The tribes involved were so bitterly opposed to the terms of the plan that Isaac I. Stevens, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Territory of Washington, and Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian affairs for Oregon Territory, signed the Nez Perce Treaty in 1855, which had granted the Nez Perce the right to remain in a large portion of their own lands in Idaho, Washington and Oregon Territories, in exchange for relinquishing almost five and a half million acres of their approximately thirteen million acre homeland to the U.S. government for a nominal sum, with the caveat that they be able to hunt, fish and pasture their horses etc. on unoccupied areas of their former land—the same rights to use public lands as Anglo-American citizens of the territories.

The newly established Nez Perce Indian reservation had covered seven and a half million acres in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington Territories.

Under the terms of the treaty, no white settlers were to be allowed on the reservation without the permission of the Nez Perce.

However, in 1860 gold had been discovered and  five thousand gold-seekers had rushed onto the reservation, illegally founding the city of Lewiston, Idaho as a supply depot on Nez Perce land.

Ranchers and farmers had followed the miners and the U.S. government had failed to keep settlers out of native lands.

The Nez Perce are incensed at the failure of the US government to uphold the treaties, and at settlers who squat on their land and plow up their camas prairies, which they depend on for subsistence.

In 1863, a group of Nez Perce had again been coerced into signing away part of their reservation to the United States, this time almost all of it, leaving only seven hundred and fifty thousand acres in Idaho Territory.

Under the terms of the treaty, all Nez Perce were to move onto the new, and much smaller, reservation.

A large number of Nez Perce, however, had not accepted the validity of the treaty, refused to move to the reservation, and remained on their traditional lands.

The Nez Perce who had approved the treaty are mostly Christian; the opponents mostly follow the traditional religion.

The “non-treaty” Nez Perce include the band of Chief Joseph who live in the Wallowa valley in Oregon.

Disputes there with white farmers and ranchers have led to murders of several Nez Perce, and the murderers have never been prosecuted.

About six hundred Nez Perce from Joseph's and White Bird's bands have gathered at the camas prairie six miles west of present-day Grangeville, Idaho, by June 14, 1877.

That day, three warriors, outraged at past abuses, attack nearby white settlers, killing four men who had wronged them.

In a subsequent raid the next day, a war party of twenty Nez Perce kills between twelve and fourteen additional settlers, including some women and children.

Joseph and his brother Ollokot were away from the camp during the raids on June 14 and 15.

When they arrived at the camp the next day, most of the Nez Perce had departed for a campsite on White Bird Creek to await the response of General Howard.

Joseph considers an appeal for peace to the Whites, but realized it would be useless after the raids.

Meanwhile, Howard mobilizes his military force and sends out one hundred and thirty men, including thirteen friendly Nez Perce scouts, under the command of Captain David Perry to punish the Nez Perce and force them onto the reservation.

Howard anticipates that his soldiers "will make short work of it."

The Nez Perce defeat Perry at the Battle of White Bird Canyon and begin their long flight to escape from the American soldiers.

Chief Joseph and White Bird are joined by Looking Glass's band and, after several battles and skirmishes in Idaho during the next month, approximately two hundred and fifty Nez Perce warriors, and five hundred women and children, along with more than two thousand head of horses and other livestock, begin a remarkable eleven hundred and seventy mile fighting retreat by the Nez Perce that becomes known as the Nez Perce War.

The Hayes administration deals with several conflicts with native tribes.

The Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, had begun an uprising in June 1877 when Major General Oliver O. Howard had ordered them to move on to a reservation.

Howard's men had defeated the Nez Perce in battle, and the tribe had begun a seventeen hundred-mile retreat into Canada.

In October, after a decisive battle at Bear Paw, Montana, Chief Joseph had surrendered and General William T. Sherman had ordered the tribe transported to Kansas.

Between November 8 and 10, the Nez Perce prisoners leave Fort Buford for what had been Custer's post command at the time of his death; Fort Abraham Lincoln, across the Missouri River from Bismark in the Dakota Territory.

About two hundred leave in the mackinaws on November 9 guarded by two companies of the First Infantry, the rest on horseback escorted by troops of the Seventh Cavalry en route to their winter quarters.

A majority of Bismarck's citizens turn out to welcome the Nez Perce, providing a lavish buffet for them and their troop escort.

On November 23, the prisoners have their lodges and equipment loaded into freight cars and themselves into eleven rail coaches for the trip via train to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

Chief Joseph had gone to Washington in January 1879 to plead that his people be allowed to return to Idaho or, at least, be given land in Indian Territory, what will become Oklahoma.

He had met with the President and Congress and had been greeted with acclaim, but opposition in Idaho had prevented the U.S. government from granting his petition.

Instead, Joseph and the Nez Perce are sent to Oklahoma and eventually locate on a small reservation near Tonkawa, Oklahoma.

Conditions in “the hot country” are hardly better than they had been at Leavenworth.

Chief Joseph and two hundred and sixty-eight surviving Nez Perce are finally allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest in 1885.

Joseph, however, is not permitted to return to the Nez Perce reservation but instead settles at the Colville Reservation in Washington, where he will die in 1904.