Chief Joseph's Surrender Speech: I Will Fight No More Forever

October fifth, eighteen seventy-seven. The Bear Paw Mountains, Montana. Forty miles from Canada.

For eleven days the Niimíipuu had been pinned in a shallow ravine in freezing weather, soldiers on every side. Looking Glass was dead, shot through the head the final morning. Toohoolhoolzote was dead. Ollokot was dead. White Bird had slipped through the Army lines in the dark with perhaps two hundred and thirty people, heading for Canada. The rest, around four hundred and thirty men, women, and children, had no food left, no horses to speak of, children sick with cold.

Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, the man Americans called Chief Joseph, rode toward General Nelson Miles carrying a rifle held across his arm in the gesture of surrender. Army Lieutenant Charles Wood was present and recorded what Joseph said, translated through a Nez Perce interpreter.

"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. 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 I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

The speech, as recorded by Wood, became the most famous surrender in the history of the American West. Whether every word is precisely as Joseph spoke it is a question historians have debated for a century. The substance is not disputed.

The four hundred and thirty Niimíipuu who surrendered at Bear Paw were not taken to Idaho. They went to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, then to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Joseph spent the rest of his life arguing for their return to Wallowa Valley. He was never allowed to go back. He died at the Colville Reservation in Washington in nineteen oh four.