The Wild West of Yesteryear Column by Rachel Kovaciny
Can you recall any quotations said by famous Native American leaders during the days of Western Expansion? I have a hunch a significant number of readers will come up with this:
“I will fight no more forever.”
If you were paying good attention to your American History classes back during school, you might even remember Chief Joseph, leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce tribe, said it. But do you know when and why?
Those six words are the end of a speech Chief Joseph gave on October 5, 1877, when he and his followers finally surrendered after a desperate, months-long bid for freedom. A soldier wrote down the English translation for his speech that day. In some ways, Chief Joseph’s whole life had been preparing him for that moment.
Born in 1840 in the traditional Wallowa homeland, which is now part of Oregon, Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce name at birth was Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, but the Reverend Henry H. Spalding, a missionary who had been ministering to the Nez Perce for four years and whom the tribe liked and respected, called him Joseph. The Nez Perce had maintained friendly and cordial relations with white settlers since the Lewis and Clark expedition contacted them over thirty years earlier.
Joseph spent a goodly portion of his childhood at missions operated by white missionaries, while also learning the traditional ways of his people. An important Nez Perce leader, his father got deeply involved in keeping the interactions peaceful and cooperative between the native and white people. In 1855, he and other tribal leaders signed a treaty with the U.S. government that guaranteed their people would keep the lands where they traditionally hunted, fished, and lived. The Nez Perce were nomadic, and the Wallowa band roamed in and around a fertile area now known as Wallowa Valley.
Many of the Nez Perce leaders rejected a second treaty in 1863, but the U.S. government enforced it anyway. It drastically reduced the land available to the tribe, leading to inevitable trouble when more white settlers entered the area. When Joseph became chief of the Wallowa band in the 1870s, relations between the Nez Perce and white officials were volatile. President Grant briefly agreed in 1873 to let them return to the Wallowa Valley, but others rescinded the permission before long. In the spring of 1877, they were told they must move immediately to a reservation in Idaho where most of the other Nez Perce bands now lived.
Chief Joseph faced a fearsome choice. Should he leave the valley his people had called home for generations? Fight against the soldiers and try to win the right to remain on his band’s ancestral land? Or flee to Canada, where Sitting Bull and the Lakota people lived now in relative freedom?
Rather than a great warrior or military tactician, Chief Joseph was a wise leader valued for his love of his people and their traditions, his good counsel, and his savvy way of dealing with friend and foe alike. His people trusted him, and they proved it by following him on a long and treacherous journey. Over 800 men, women, and children from the Wallowas and a neighboring Palouse band followed him out of Oregon and eastward across what is now Montana. They were hard-pressed to evade the pursuing soldiers led by General O. O. Howard, but the Nez Perce proved skillful in fending off their would-be captors. Because of the many skirmishes and minor battles they fought along the way, their 1,200-mile journey became known as the Nez Perce War.
In October, the soldiers trapped Chief Joseph and his followers in Montana, a mere forty miles short of their goal of the Canadian border and freedom. Rather than stand and fight yet again, Chief Joseph preserved what remained of his people and their proud heritage by surrendering.
Although promised he and his people could join the rest of the Nez Perce in Idaho, Chief Joseph was considered too dangerous to be reunited with his tribe. He and his followers were taken first to Kansas, then moved to Oklahoma.
Chief Joseph never stopped advocating for his people and even met with President Hayes in 1879 to plead for better treatment and a return to their homeland. In 1885, they were taken back to the Pacific Northwest, where they settled on a reservation in Washington State. Despite a trip in 1903 to Washington, DC, where he met with President Theodore Roosevelt, Chief Joseph could not convince governmental authorities to either let his people rejoin the rest of the Nez Perce in Idaho or return to Wallowa Valley. He died on the reservation in Washington in 1904 at only 64. His doctor stated that Chief Joseph had died of a broken heart.
In 1877, when he surrendered his rifle to General Howard, Chief Joseph made his most famous speech, which ended with:
“It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people—some of them—have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps 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!”
(source: americanrhetoric.com)
Even that small sample of Chief Joseph’s quality of leadership gives us a good idea of why hundreds of people of all ages would follow him into the unknown, and why we still remember some of his words to this day.
