Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph, born Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt on 3 March 1840 and living until 21 September 1904, was a leader of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce, a Native American people of the interior Pacific Northwest, succeeding his father Chief Joseph the Elder in the early 1870s. He led his band during the most tumultuous period in Nez Perce history, when the United States federal government forcibly removed them from their ancestral lands in Oregon's Wallowa Valley toward a reduced reservation in Idaho Territory; a series of violent encounters with white settlers in the spring of 1877 led Joseph's band and an allied Palouse band to flee the United States, attempting to reach political asylum in Canada alongside the Lakota under Sitting Bull. At least eight hundred Nez Perce men, women and children led by Joseph and other chiefs were pursued by the United States Army under General Oliver O. Howard on an eleven hundred seventy mile fighting retreat known as the Nez Perce War, and their conduct under adversity earned them widespread admiration from their military opponents and the American public. In October 1877, after months of fugitive resistance, the surviving remnants of Joseph's band were cornered in northern Montana Territory just forty miles from the Canadian border, and Joseph surrendered to the Army on the understanding that his people would be allowed to return to their Idaho reservation; instead they were transported among various forts and reservations on the southern Great Plains before being moved to the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, where Joseph died in 1904.