Chief Joseph’s Legacy Debated

Summer turned to autumn when the great Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph died in his sleep hundreds of miles from his beloved Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon.

It was Sept. 21, 1904, some 27 years after his famous “I will fight no more forever” speech marking the end of a nearly 1,200-mile running battle with U.S. Army troops.

A century after his death, historians still debate whether he was a great war chief or simply a leader with diplomatic skills who wanted to be allowed to stay on his traditional homeland.

“To many Americans, he is a national hero ... for his tenacity and brilliant effort to take his people to a safe place,” said Thomas Sweeney, spokesman for the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

“Beyond that, his comments are directed to all people. There is a message there of living in peace.”

Rather than be forceably moved from traditional lands taken by treaty, Joseph had fled northeastern Oregon with about 400 members of his tribe, mostly women and children but including 64 warriors.

For nearly four months, they outmaneuvered 2,000 pursuing cavalry across Idaho and Wyoming before being surrounded and surrendering in northern Montana, just 30 miles shy of freedom in Canada.

The retreat became known as the Nez Perce War of 1877.

Joseph, the son of a Nez Perce tribal chief, was later banished with a small band of followers to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington state, where he would remain until his death.

Born about 60 years earlier in northeastern Oregon, Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekt, “Thunder Rolling in the Mountains,” was buried in what is now a weed-choked cemetery on the Colville reservation, about 100 miles northwest of Spokane.

Above his simple grave -- strewn with plastic flowers, feathers, coins, tobacco and candy -- is a white granite column -- its top broken off -- that says: “He led his people in the Nez Perce War of 1877.”

He is best remembered for his words of surrender:

“I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Although he came from a relatively obscure band in the Pacific Northwest, Joseph became a well-known figure after his plight was taken up by supporters in the east, said Dave Nicandri, director of the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma.

“He was among the handful of most famous Indian chiefs and warriors, up there with Geronimo and Sitting Bull,” Nicandri said.

Nez Perce Tribal Chairman Tony Johnson said Joseph was a forceful advocate for returning his people to the Northwest from exile in Oklahoma.

“He found a lot of friends in the non-Indian community that advocated for a return to the Northwest,” said Johnson, a descendant of Olikut, one of the chiefs killed in the Nez Perce War and possibly the true war chief.

But the return was not without more grief for the Nez Perce, Johnson said.

A condition of return to the reservation at Lapwai was acceptance of Christianity. Joseph and about 150 followers who wanted to retain their traditional beliefs were sent to the Colville reservation, with members of a dozen other tribes and bands. Others went to the Umatilla reservation in northern Oregon.

Disputes over religion and acceptance of treaties caused rifts within the tribe that are still felt today, Johnson said.

“It left a pretty deep wound. We’re really all broken up as a family on three reservations due to U.S. government policy at that time,” he said. “We’re all members of the same family, all victims of the U.S. government policy that was employed when we returned from exile.”

Joseph’s father, who died in 1871, refused to accept terms of a peace treaty in 1855 that was intended to open the area for thousands of gold miners and settlers. It was superseded by another pact in 1863 that shrunk the Nez Perce’s homeland to one-tenth its original size.

When Joseph succeeded his father, he also refused to accept treaty terms, but worked to maintain peaceful relations with whites that had existed since the 1805 Lewis and Clark expedition.

Nez Perce historians say the tribe’s name -- “Pierced Nose” in French -- was given by a French Canadian interpreter with the expedition, although the practice was not common to the tribe, which called itself Nimi’ipuu.

The original Nez Perce homeland encompassed portions of southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon and most of central Idaho. The tribe’s summer camp was at Wallowa Lake in northeastern Oregon near the present-day town of Joseph and the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

When Gen. Oliver O. Howard threatened to forcefully remove the Nez Perce to the small reservation in north-central Idaho at Lapwai, Joseph and his band set out for Canada.

Thus began the nearly 1,200-mile strategic retreat, marked by six battles that culminated in the Bear Paw Mountains in northern Montana, where U.S. Army troops finally surrounded the band on Oct. 5, 1877.

Captured and sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, then to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, Joseph relentlessly campaigned for his people to be returned to the Pacific Northwest.

In 1885, the government allowed Nez Perce who had converted to Christianity to return to the tribe’s reservation at Lapwai.

Joseph was forced into exile at Colville, never to permanently return to his beloved Wallowas.

“Up until his dying day, Chief Joseph never stopped trying to get a homeland in Wallowa,” Johnson said. “The tribe honors all our ancestors for their struggles. Regardless if they are divided by church affiliations, that is a tribal and family value you’ll get from all three areas.”