Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalahtq'it)

Joseph led the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce, who had signed a treaty in 1855 keeping their valley in what is now north-eastern Oregon. When gold was found, a second treaty was produced in 1863 that gave up nine-tenths of the land, signed by leaders who had no authority over the Wallowa. His father refused it; Joseph inherited the refusal and, for years, argued the case in words rather than arms.

In 1877 the army gave the band thirty days to move. Fighting broke out, and about seven hundred people, most of them women, children and elders, set out for Canada with the cavalry behind them. Over four months they covered some nineteen hundred kilometres through Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, outmanoeuvring larger forces in a retreat that was studied afterwards in military academies. They were surrounded in the Bear Paw Mountains, sixty kilometres from the border. Joseph's surrender speech ends with a line schoolchildren still learn. The survivors were sent to Kansas and Oklahoma, where many died; he was never allowed to return to the Wallowa and died on the Colville reservation, the agency doctor reporting the cause as a broken heart.