Joseph (Chief Joseph)

Joseph (Chief Joseph), c.1840-1904, chief of a group of Nez Percé . On his father's death in 1871, Joseph became leader of one of the groups that refused to leave the land ceded to the United States by the fraudulently obtained treaty of 1863. Faced with forcible removal (1877), Joseph and the other nontreaty chiefs prepared to leave peacefully for the reservation. Misinformed about the intentions of the Nez Percé, Gen. Oliver Otis Howard ordered an attack, which the Native Americans repulsed. Pursued by the U.S. army, the warriors, with many women and children, began a masterly retreat to Canada of more than 1,000 mi (1,609 km). The Nez Percé won several engagements, notably one at Big Hole, Mont., but 30 mi (48 km) short of the Canadian border they were trapped in a cul-de-sac by troops under Gen. Nelson A. Miles and forced to surrender. His eloquent surrender speech is one of the best-known Native American statements. The whites had assumed that Joseph, spokesman for the tribe in peacetime, was responsible for their outstanding strategy and tactics, which actually had been agreed upon in council by all the chiefs. He became, however, a symbol of the heroic, fighting retreat of the Nez Percés. He was taken to Fort Leavenworth, then spent the remainder of his life on the Colville Indian Reservation in the state of Washington and strove to improve the conditions of his people. In 1903 he made a ceremonial visit to Washington, D.C.

Bibliography: See biographies by O. O. Howard (1881, repr. 1972) and H. A. Howard (1941, repr. 1965); M. D. Beal, I Will Fight No More Forever (1985).

Chief Joseph (1840–1904), Nez Perce Indian chief (upon his father's death in 1871), leader of a band living in the Wallowa Valley of eastern Oregon.Neither father nor son had subscribed to the treaties that established and then reduced the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho. When in 1877 the federal government ordered all Nez Perces to settle on the reservation, Joseph complied, but en route some young men committed depredations that set off the Nez Perce War of 1877. In subsequent battles with the U.S. Army, and in the famed trek of eight hundred Nez Perces in a desperate bid for Canadian refuge, Joseph was one of several chiefs. Others, war chiefs, played a larger military role. However, after the final battle at Bear Paw Mountain, Montana (5 October 1877), with other leading chiefs dead or escaping to Canada, Joseph surrendered with the famous speech ending, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” Thus in white perceptions, Chief Joseph became the “Red Napoleon” who had repeatedly outwitted American generals and conducted a humane war. Confined with his people in the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), he endeared himself to Americans and in 1893 was allowed to move to a reservation in Washington State, where he passed his remaining years.
See also Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Merrill D. Beal , “I Will Fight No More Forever”: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War, 1963.
Alvin M. Josephy Jr. , The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, 1965.

Robert M. Utley