The Nez Perce Flight: One Thousand Miles Toward Canada

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, a band of Nez Perce people who had never signed a treaty with the United States found themselves at war with the United States Army. What followed was one of the longest fighting retreats in the history of North American warfare.

The Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon was the homeland of the band led by a man Americans called Chief Joseph. His Nez Perce name was Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain. His father, Old Joseph, had refused to sign the Walla Walla Treaty of eighteen fifty-five and its reductions. When gold was discovered in Nez Perce territory in the early eighteen sixties, pressure intensified. A new treaty in eighteen sixty-three removed the Wallowa Valley from Nez Perce control entirely, signed by Nez Perce leaders who had no authority to speak for the Wallowa band. Old Joseph died in eighteen seventy-one still holding his homeland. His son held it until eighteen seventy-seven, when the United States Army ordered the non-treaty bands onto a reservation within thirty days.

The thirty days came and went. A series of killings by young Nez Perce men triggered the war. What General Oliver Howard expected to be a brief punitive campaign became a chase of more than one thousand miles across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, through Yellowstone, toward Canada and a hoped-for refuge with Sitting Bull's Lakota people.

The Nez Perce fought and outmaneuvered a series of Army columns over four months. They were not trying to conquer anyone. They were trying to reach a border.

They came within forty miles of it. General Nelson Miles cut them off in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana in late September. After five days of fighting in early October snow, Joseph surrendered. His surrender speech as recorded and translated by the Army that day closed with words that have been quoted ever since: "From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." Historians note the translation is a summary, not a verbatim transcript, but the meaning Joseph conveyed is consistent across all accounts of that moment.

He and his band were not returned to the Wallowa Valley. They were sent first to Indian Territory in what is now Kansas, then to the Colville Reservation in Washington. Joseph appealed repeatedly for return to his homeland. He was never permitted to go back. He died on the Colville Reservation in nineteen oh four. The reservation doctor listed the cause of death as a broken heart.

The Wallowa Valley is still there. It is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Oregon. The Nez Perce have no reservation in it.