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In the late 19th century, as the United States expanded across the West, one Native leader became famous not only for his resistance, but for the words he used after it ended.
His people crossed mountains, fought battles, and traveled more than a thousand miles while the U.S. Army pursued them.
Yet his greatest legacy may have come afterward, when he became one of the most eloquent advocates for Native rights in American history.
Learn more about Chief Joseph, his people, and their incredible journey on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Chief Joseph was one of the most famous Native American leaders of the nineteenth century. Born around 1840 in what is now northeastern Oregon, he became the principal political leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce tribe.
The Nez Perce had lived in the Wallowa Valley of eastern Oregon for centuries.
The story of Chief Joseph’s rise to prominence begins at the 1855 Walla Walla Council. The Walla Walla Council brought together U.S. officials and Native nations of the Pacific Northwest and produced several treaties that established reservations and opened large areas of Indigenous land to American settlement.
At the conference, the Nez Perce leaders, led by Chief Old Joseph, believed they had secured their land.
The tribal leaders ceded 7.5 million acres to the federal government while securing their jurisdiction over ancestral lands, including the Wallowa Valley.
Unlike many treaties between the U.S. government and indigenous nations, this treaty had the unanimous consent of all 56 bands of the Nez Perce. Old Joseph left the council confident that the agreement had secured his people’s future.
Unfortunately, the peace lasted barely a year.
The Senate ratified the treaty in 1859, and in 1860, prospectors trespassing on Nez Perce lands discovered gold in northern Idaho. Under the 1855 treaty, non-Native settlers, miners, and traders were strictly barred from entering or occupying reservation land without tribal consent.
While the U.S. government initially acknowledged the treaty and ordered trespassers out, enforcement quickly evaporated as thousands of miners poured into the region. Illegal boomtowns sprang up directly on Nez Perce land, most notably Lewiston, Idaho, founded in 1861 as a rogue supply depot.
By 1863, the gold rush was too lucrative for Washington to ignore, and rather than protecting tribal sovereignty, the federal government moved to dismantle the very treaty it had signed. Instead of enforcing the 1855 treaty, the U.S. government changed its terms.
In 1863, commissioners drafted a new agreement that slashed the reservation by nearly 90% to seize the goldfields and legitimise boomtowns.
Traditionally, the Nez Perce were independent bands, meaning no single leader had the authority to surrender another band’s homeland.
They exploited this by convincing one Nez Perce leader Chief Lawyer, whose territory lay safely inside the shrunken borders, to sign on behalf of the entire nation. Leaders like Old Joseph refused and walked out, branding it the “Thief Treaty.”
Yet Washington treated Chief Lawyer’s signature as universally binding, instantly turning non-signers into illegal squatters on their own ancestral land.
The irony was that the Nez Perce were precisely the kind of Native people who had worked with the United States. In the early nineteenth century, they had welcomed and aided Lewis and Clark when the starving explorers first crossed the Bitterroot Mountains.
For decades, they accommodated trade, lived alongside expanding settlements, and negotiated in good faith with government commissioners. Many within the tribe had even embraced Christianity.
They did everything they were asked to do to maintain peace, which is why the actions taken by the government felt like a tremendous betrayal.
The Nez Perce suffered another tremendous setback in 1871 when Chief Old Joseph died.
Chief Joseph recounted the promise his father extracted on his deathbed, when he said, “You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”
Chief Joseph took those words as a sacred responsibility.
Under the “Thief Treaty”, the Nez Perce bands who signed the treaty were relegated to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho. Those who didn’t sign lived a precarious existence on their ancestral lands. This included Chief Joseph and his band in the Wallowa Valley.
However, ranchers and settlers now viewed their presence in the valley, where they had lived for centuries, as illegal squatting.
Eventually, the government ran out of patience with the non-signatory Nez Perce living outside the reservation. In May 1877, General Oliver O. Howard, acting on behalf of the United States Government, summoned the non-signatory chiefs to a council on the Lapwai reservation.
During that meeting, he presented the rogue chiefs with an ultimatum. Howard mandated that the bands had 30 days to round up their families, thousands of cattle, and horse herds, abandon their homes, and relocate within the Lapwai Reservation boundaries.
Despite the hard line he took with the holdouts, Howard privately recognized that the Nez Perce had been treated unjustly. Early on, he even advocated letting Joseph’s band keep the Wallowa Valley, but political pressure from settlers and direct orders from Washington forced his hand.
Realizing that Howard’s mandate was firm and that the United States’ position was not open to compromise, Chief Joseph and the other leaders agreed to move into the Lapwai Reservation.
After gathering all their belongings, including the difficult task of moving their herds across the region’s high waters in late spring, Chief Joseph and the other leaders camped just outside the reservation at Lake Tolo before moving onto the reservation.
During this tense gathering, camped just outside the reservation boundary, a handful of young Nez Perce warriors snapped. Enraged by the forced expulsion and seeking vengeance for the unpunished murders of their people, they slipped away and attacked a group of settlers along the Salmon River. The raids quickly escalated as other warriors joined in, ultimately leaving eighteen settlers dead.
With peace shattered, General Howard had no choice but to respond with military force.
General Howard ordered Captain David Perry to ride to the region with 100 men. A Nez Perce truce party of six greeted them, flying a white flag of peace. One of Perry’s men fired on the peace party, scattering them and rallying 70 Nez Perce warriors.
Armed with older guns and bows and arrows, the Nez Perce unleashed a counterattack.The warriors targeted officers and the buglers, sowing disunity and confusion among Perry’s men.
The counterattack was a staggering Nez Perce victory. While Captain Perry lost a third of his men, the Nez Perce warriors suffered zero fatalities and just three wounded.
Perry’s men were impressed, with one soldier noting, I have been in lots of scrapes, but I never went up against anything like the Nez Perce in all my life.
The victory became front-page national news at the worst possible time for the U.S. Army. Just one year after George Armstrong Custer’s annihilation at the Little Bighorn, the rout at White Bird Canyon stoked national panic about another frontier disaster.
Rather than advance or stay at White Bird Canyon, the Nez Perce moved past the Salmon River.
The Army feared that Chief Looking Glass, the Nez Perce military strategist, might reinforce the non-treaty bands. General Howard dispatched a cavalry detachment onto the reservation to arrest him, even though the chief had declared complete neutrality.
Troops surrounded the village at Clear Creek, and Looking Glass dispatched a group to meet them under a white flag of peace, but negotiations suddenly shattered when an undisciplined soldier fired into the camp.
The operation was an unmitigated disaster.
Looking Glass and most of his people slipped away, leaving frustrated soldiers to burn the village and plunder their prize horse herd.
General Howard had achieved nothing of strategic merit.
Instead, by killing innocent Nez Perce in an unprovoked raid, he surrendered any claim to the moral high ground. The unprovoked attack only succeeded in driving a brilliant military strategist off the sidelines and straight into the war.
When Howard finally caught up with the bands near the Clearwater River in Idaho, the odds were heavily in his favor: over four hundred soldiers, backed by Gatling guns and howitzers, facing barely a hundred warriors defending their families. Although the Nez Perce fought valiantly and held out for over a day, the chiefs knew the position was untenable.
While rear-guard warriors pinned down Howard’s infantry, the families packed what they could and crossed the river. It was the start of an epic, fighting retreat that would carry them nearly twelve hundred miles through some of the most rugged wilderness on the continent.
Chief Joseph was now responsible for the safety of hundreds of children and the elderly, as well as thousands of horses, while being pursued by the U.S. Army.
The Nez Perce hoped to join with their allies in the Crow nation. Their strategic retreat took them to a secluded valley at Big Hole in the Montana Territory, where they believed they had put distance between themselves and Howard’s forces.
However, the Nez Perce didn’t know Colonel John Gibbon had arrived. His men launched a surprise attack, killing more than 60 Nez Perce.
Tragedy struck when Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce reached the Crow Nation safely, only to be turned away for fear that they would be treated as collaborators. Denied harbour by the Crow, Chief Joseph committed to taking his people to Canada, where they would join with the great Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull.
The Nez Perce arrived near the Canadian border in September. Having outdistanced Howard’s forces, the chiefs slowed their pace, unaware of the reach of the electric telegraph.
While Howard lagged, telegrams had already dispatched a new strike force. Barely forty miles short of the Canadian border, the exhausted Nez Perce suddenly found themselves surrounded and under siege by Colonel Nelson Miles.
Winter came early that September, and the Nez Perce fought the well-supplied American forces as well as bitter snow and cold. After a five-day artillery siege, Miles summoned Chief Joseph and promised him that his surrender would pave the way for a return to their homeland.
While Chief White Bird and over a hundred followers slipped past the siege lines in the dark and made a final dash into Canada, Joseph refused to abandon the freezing women and wounded children.
Unable to watch his people suffer any longer, he laid down his rifle and surrendered to Colonel Miles, trusting the officer’s promise that they would return home.
In explaining his rationale to the council, Chief Joseph provided some of the most famous words in American history: “I am tired of fighting.” Our chiefs are killed…It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are 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; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever!”
Chief Joseph’s faith was misplaced. General William Tecumseh Sherman, the top ranking general in the Army, despite expressing his admiration for the Nez Perce, issued a clear decree: They should never be allowed to return to Oregon.
Instead of returning to their beloved Wallowa Valley, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce were sent to the Oklahoma Territory. While in Oklahoma, the Nez Perce lived under dreadful conditions rife with starvation and disease.
In the first year alone, sixty-eight of the arrivals died. Among them was Daytime Smoke, William Clark’s elderly son, born after the 1806 Lewis and Clark expedition and raised among his mother’s people.
Over the next twenty-five years, Chief Joseph lobbied tirelessly for his people to return to the Wallowa Valley, fighting relentlessly for their freedom.
Despite his high-profile appeals and eloquent arguments, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce never won the right to return home. Instead, they were relegated to a reservation in Washington State, where Chief Joseph died in 1904.
The official medical report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs doctor on the reservation declared his cause of death to be “a broken heart.”
Chief Joseph died hundreds of miles from his homeland after a tireless fight to return to his ancestral home, keeping his promise to his father. Despite decades of hardship and adversity, he never did sell the sacred Wallowa Valley and fought for it until his very last breath.