“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." March 10, 2022
Volume 52 - No. 10
By lyle e davis
Most of us have heard of many of the more famous Indian chiefs, Cochise, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other lesser lights . . . but most of us have not been exposed to one of the more outstanding Indian Chiefs . . . a Chief who was not only a masterful warrior and war strategist, but was also a logical and humanistic thinker. He was also an eloquent speaker and spoke often, and to influentical people, about the human rights issue, the value of Mother Earth, and the pain of discrimination against the Indian peoples. His name was Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce.
Far in the Northwest of our country lived the Chopunnish or Nez Perce Indians, a powerful tribe. Chopunnish is an Indian word, but Nez Perce is French and means pierced noses. The name comes from the fact that these Indians used to pierce their noses and wear rings in them.
The man who became a national celebrity with the name "Chief Joseph" was born in the Wallowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon in 1840. He was given the name Hin-mah-tooyah-lat-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, but was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838. Joseph the Elder was one of the first Nez Percé converts to The Paper - 760.747.7119
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Chief Joseph
Christianity and an active supporter of the tribe's longstanding peace with whites. In 1855 he even helped Washington's territorial governor set up a Nez Percé reservation that stretched from Oregon into Idaho. But in 1863, following a gold rush into Nez Percé territory, the federal government took back almost six million acres of this land, restricting the Nez Percé to a reservation in Idaho that was only one tenth its prior size. Feeling himself betrayed, Joseph the Elder denounced the United States, destroyed his American flag and his Bible, and refused to move his band from the Wallowa Valley or sign the treaty that would make the new reservation boundaries official.
When his father died in 1871, Joseph was elected to succeed him. He inherited not only a name but a situation made increasingly volatile as white settlers continued to arrive in the
Chief Joseph with family during imprisonment in Kansas. Joseph is believed to have been thirty-nine or forty years old and the women are three of the total of four wives he would have during his lifetime. F. M. Sargent, photo artist, Anthony, Kansas, 1878 or 1879. Courtesy National Park Service, Nez Perce National Historic Site, Spalding, Idaho. Neg. # 128. Wallowa Valley. Joseph staunchly resisted all efforts to force his band onto the small Idaho reservation, and in 1873 a federal order to remove white settlers and let his people remain in the Wallowa Valley made it appear that he might be successful. But the federal government soon reversed itself, and in 1877 General Oliver Otis Howard threatened a cavalry attack to force Joseph's band and other
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hold-outs onto the reservation. Here is an account by General Howard:
“The men of the tribe are large and tall and strong, and they are very proud and warlike. Every year they went far away, even one thousand miles, to hunt buffalo, while the women planted little patches of Indian corn and the boys rode ponies or fished for salmon in the rivers. Now