Chief Joseph

(1840 - 1904)

In 1877 Chief Joseph led a Nez Percé group resisting resettlement on a three-month trek toward Canada, fighting thirteen battles along the way. By the time the group surrendered, forty miles south of their destination, half of its members had died. “I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find,” Joseph said as he surrendered. Over the next three decades, he met with three American presidents to appeal for his tribe’s return to the Wallowa valley in Oregon but did not succeed before his death in 1904.