On October 5, 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrendered to the United States Army after a fighting retreat that covered over 1,170 miles across four states. His people were exhausted, starving, and forty miles from the Canadian border and safety. He reportedly said: From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. The speech is one of the most quoted statements in American history. The promises made to him in exchange for the surrender were broken before the year was out.

The Nez Perce Did Not Want a War

The Nez Perce had been cooperative with the United States government for decades. They had signed treaties. They had ceded land. They had maintained peace while neighboring nations fought. In 1855, they agreed to a reservation that preserved their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon. In 1863, the government unilaterally reduced that reservation by ninety percent, and the Nez Perce who lived in the Wallowa Valley, including Chief Joseph's band, refused to recognize the new treaty because they had not signed it. Historians at the Nez Perce National Historical Park have documented that the 1877 conflict began when the government ordered Joseph's band to relocate to the reduced reservation within thirty days. The deadline was impossibly short. Tensions escalated. Young warriors killed several white settlers in retaliation for past grievances. The Army mobilized. Chief Joseph, who had argued consistently against war, was forced into one. Here is the thing about the Nez Perce War that American history textbooks rarely emphasize. Joseph did not start it. He tried to prevent it. When it became unavoidable, he and other Nez Perce leaders, including Looking Glass and Ollokot, conducted one of the most brilliant tactical retreats in military history.

The Retreat Was a Military Masterwork

The Nez Perce force numbered approximately 750 people, of whom only about 200 were warriors. They were accompanied by elderly people, women, children, and a herd of two thousand horses. Over the course of four months, they fought the U.S. Army in multiple engagements, winning most of them, while crossing some of the most difficult terrain in North America, including the Bitterroot Mountains and Yellowstone. Military historians at the U.S. Army War College have studied the Nez Perce campaign and described it as one of the most impressive fighting retreats in recorded history. The tactical leadership was distributed among several chiefs, but Joseph handled logistics, the management of non-combatants, the movement of horses, the allocation of supplies. He kept seven hundred and fifty people alive and moving across mountains while being pursued by an army that outnumbered them and had unlimited reinforcements. They were stopped forty miles from the Canadian border by Colonel Nelson Miles, who had been ordered to intercept them while General Howard pursued from behind. The final battle, at Bear Paw, lasted five days. Many of the Nez Perce escaped to Canada. Joseph, with the wounded and the elderly, could not.

The Surrender Promise Was a Lie

Joseph surrendered on the understanding that his people would be allowed to return to the reservation in Idaho. They were not. They were sent to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where disease killed many of them. Joseph spent the rest of his life petitioning the government to honor the terms of his surrender. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes. He was eloquent, persistent, and completely ignored. Researchers at Washington State University have documented that Joseph was eventually allowed to settle on the Colville Reservation in Washington, not his homeland. He died there in 1904. The reservation doctor said he died of a broken heart. That is not a medical diagnosis. It may be an accurate one. I think about Chief Joseph when I think about what honor means in a system that does not practice it. He honored every treaty. He honored the terms of his surrender. He honored the principle that his people should be treated as human beings with rights. The system that defeated him honored none of those things, and his speech, the most beautiful surrender in American history, is still quoted by the same government that broke every promise it contained.