Chief Joseph

His father drew a line on the ground. When commissioners came back in 1863 and offered the Nez Perce 760,000 acres around Lapwai — down from the 7.7 million the 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla had promised, with the Wallowa Valley cut out of it — Tuekakas refused to sign and marked the valley's edge with a run of poles. Inside that boundary, he said, all our people were born, and it circles the graves of our fathers. The refusal split the Nez Perce into treaty and non-treaty bands. Young Joseph took over the Wallowa band about 1871, carrying his father's last instruction: stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home, and never sell the bones of your father and your mother.

What happened in 1877 is usually told as a military campaign. About 750 Nez Perce and an allied band of Palouse left Idaho, tried for the Crow country, were refused, and turned north to look for Sitting Bull in Canada. Of the roughly 740 people gathered at the Clearwater, only 200 were fighting men. They covered more than 1,170 miles across five present-day states before the Army stopped them. BriefHistory carries the flight, the battles and the surrender. This page is about the man the retreat was named after, who was not commanding it.

The reputation rests on a speech he may not have delivered. Mark Herbert Brown wrote that the story of Joseph handing over his rifle with a touching little speech while Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood stood by with a pencil and a paper pad does not have a word of truth in it. Joseph was not a war chief and probably did not direct the retreat — most of the leaders who did were dead by the end of it — but the words drew the attention, and the credit followed. Sherman praised him and the newspapers called him the Red Napoleon. Francis Haines, citing L. V. McWhorter, argued that on a battlefield he had neither skill nor experience, and Merle Wells argued that retreat and surrender were the Army's vocabulary, not the Nez Perce's.

He never got the valley back, and the country named everything else after him. There is a Chief Joseph Mountain, a Chief Joseph Pass, a Joseph Canyon, a town of Joseph in Oregon, and a dam on the Columbia that is the only one in the Northwest carrying a Native name. The Post Office put him on a stamp in 1968. Disney built an animatronic of him at Epcot, voiced by Dehl Berti, that interrupts Franklin and Twain to talk about how Native people were treated. In June 2012 his war shirt from the 1870s sold to a private collector for 877,500 dollars. Edmond Meany and Edward Curtis helped his family bury him at Nespelem, where the grave still is.

Chief Joseph's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Address to General Howard at Fort Lapwai speech
  On his disbelief that one kind of man was given the right to tell another what he must do 1877
• The surrender statement of October 5, 1877 speech
  Recorded by Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood and disputed by historians ever since 1877
• An Indian's View of Indian Affairs article
  Published in the North American Review as Chief Joseph's Own Story 1879
• The Washington petitions other
  Twenty-five years of argument for the Wallowa band's return, made to Hayes in 1879 and Roosevelt in 1903 1879

• March 3, 1840 aged 0 Born in the Wallowa Valley
• 1855 aged ~15 The Treaty of Walla Walla sets aside 7.7 million acres, Wallowa included
• 1863 aged ~23 A second council cuts the reservation to 760,000 acres and drops Wallowa Joseph the Elder refused to sign, splitting the Nez Perce into treaty and non-treaty bands.
• 1871 aged ~31 Succeeds his father as leader of the Wallowa band
• June 17, 1877 aged 37 The Nez Perce turn back the Army at White Bird Canyon Thirty-four soldiers were killed. Three Nez Perce were wounded.
• October 5, 1877 aged 37 Surrenders after more than 1,170 miles 150 of his followers had been killed or wounded by then.
• April 1879 aged 39 Publishes his case in the North American Review and meets President Hayes
• 1885 aged ~45 Allowed back to the Northwest, but sent to Colville rather than Wallowa or Lapwai Chief Moses of the Sinkiuse-Columbia resented ceding land to people who had made war on the government.
• September 21, 1904 aged 64 Dies at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation

• Sitting Bull 1831–1890
  Hunkpapa Lakota leader and spiritual figure who resisted U.S. expansion and defended tribal sovereignty. sought asylum with
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. overruled by
• Rutherford B. Hayes 1822–1893
  Nineteenth president whose disputed election settlement ended federal Reconstruction in the South. petitioned
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. petitioned
• Sarah Winnemucca 1844–1891
  Northern Paiute author and lecturer who petitioned Washington over reservation abuses. argued the same case