Analysis: Speech by Chief Joseph on a Visit to Washington, DC

Date: 1879

Author: Chief Joseph

Genre: speech

Summary Overview

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce people came to Washington in 1879 to ask questions. His people had wanted to continue to live as they always had on their ancestral homeland. When white settlers desired the Nez Perces' land, however, the Nez Perce were forcibly removed. In 1877, fleeing a cavalry attack aimed at driving the Nez Perces from their home in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, Joseph led a group of 700 of his people (only 200 of whom were warriors) on a 1,400-mile tactical retreat, trying to reach safety in Canada. When he finally did surrender, he was promised that his people would be able to return to their homes in the Wallowa Valley, but they were instead forced to go to Kansas and then relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was during this exile that Chief Joseph made his trip to Washington.

Defining Moment

Since the 1830s, Indian removal had been the official policy of the federal government in the East. In the Southeast, where white Americans were eager to plant cotton and other crops grown for profit on plantations worked by slaves, the federal government forced tribes like the Cherokee to move to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. By the 1850s and 1860s, the gaze of white settlers seeking more land turned to the West. In the Wallowa Valley of eastern Oregon and western Idaho, the Nez Perce people saw settlers coming down the Oregon Trail in large numbers. Chief Joseph's father, Old Joseph, worked with the territorial government to establish a reservation for his people, giving up some land in return for the hope of being able to remain in their territory. However, in 1863, the federal government reduced the size of the Nez Perce Reservation by some ninety percent—approximately six million acres—and Old Joseph was incensed.

When Chief Joseph took over leadership after his father's death in 1871, he continued his father's resistance to the small reservation in Idaho. An 1873 agreement reached with the federal government that allowed the Nez Perces to remain and prevented white settlement was revoked only two years later. By early 1877, however, Chief Joseph had seen the futility of resistance and began to lead his people to the reservation. After a number of young warriors in his group resisted by staging a raid that resulted in a number of white deaths, however, he was forced to continue resisting by trying to lead his people to safety in Canada while being pursued by the US Army. Fighting a number of defensive actions along the way, Joseph won almost universal praise not only for his skill as a military leader, but also for the “civilized” way in which he and his people fought, restraining themselves from scalping slain soldiers, releasing captive women, and not killing innocent families that lived near the battle sites. However influential Joseph was in the Nez Perce way of making war, later research has revealed that it was actually other leaders, such as one named Looking Glass, who deserve much of the credit for military strategy.

Although the popular press and stalwarts, such as General William Tecumseh Sherman praised Chief Joseph, such praise resulted in little benefit for his people. After being promised by General Nelson Miles, who led the pursuing forces, that he and his people would be allowed to return to the Idaho reservation if he surrendered, they were taken to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where poor conditions resulted in many deaths. The Nez Perces were eventually allowed to settle on a part of the Cherokee Reservation in Indian Territory, over a thousand miles from their homeland. It was then that Joseph began to do whatever he could to convince the federal government to allow his people to return to a reduced reservation close to their homelands.

Author Biography

Chief Joseph was named Hin-mah-too-lat-kekt (Thunder Rolling down the Mountain) upon his birth circa 1840, but also took the Christian name Joseph that his father had taken upon his conversion to Christianity. Chief Joseph became leader of his band of Nez Perces upon his father's death in 1871. His father had worked to maintain good relationships with the non-Indian settlers, so that his people would be able to stay in the Wallowa Valley. Their peaceful coexistence ended, however, after gold was discovered in the region in 1860 and the federal government reneged on its 1873 pledge of a permanent homeland for the Nez Perces in the valley a few years later. Subsequently, Chief Joseph led his people on a 1,400-mile trip, staying ahead of the Army when they could and fighting tactical battles when they could not. After his exhausted people submitted to the Army, Joseph delivered his iconic surrender speech, stating famously, “I will fight no more forever.”

Document Analysis

Chief Joseph, who assumed the leadership of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perces in 1871, assumed a much wider leadership in 1877, when he led approximately seven hundred of his people on a quest to reach Canada in order to preserve their traditional way of life. However, when he and his people—worn out, tired, and hungry from the 1,400 mile trek—surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Montana, only forty miles short of the Canadian border, he became a symbol of what was perceived as the end of the traditional American Indian way of life. Some parts of that way of life could be maintained on reservations, but Joseph, like his father before him, was determined that the reservation should be on the homelands of his people in the Wallowa Valley.

After the surrender, however, Chief Joseph and his people were not returned home, but were taken first to Fort Leavenworth and then to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, which resulted in virulent disease outbreaks among his people. By June 1879, out of the 700 that started on the trek, only 370 remained alive. In January of that year, Chief Joseph had been allowed to go to Washington, DC, in order to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes, but he was dissatisfied with the outcome. In his speech, Chief Joseph focuses on the dissonance between the words and the actions of the army and federal government. From Miles's promise of a return to Oregon to the promises of assistance in helping the Nez Perces start to farm, Chief Joseph concludes, “It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises.”

The solution to the problem, according to Joseph, is as simple as it is American—that all people should be treated the same way under the law and that their freedom and self-determination should be respected. He has already accepted the inevitability of changing over to non-Indian ways of life, but the only way that he sees this being successful is by treating Indian people just as white people are before the law and allowing them the freedom of movement that is taken for granted by other Americans: “You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.” Much of what Joseph says may seem like common sense in post–civil rights movement America, and may even echo earlier arguments, such as those made by Cherokee leader John Ross some forty years prior, but neither proved persuasive enough to slow, stop, or mediate white settlement and cultural domination of the United States or the government's corresponding maltreatment of American Indians.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Hampton, Bruce. Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877. 1994. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Print.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Nez Perce Country. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. Print.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. 1979. Boston: Houghton, 1997. Print.

West, Elliot. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.