I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is
dead. Toohulhulsote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the
young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead. [That
was Ollicut.] It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children
are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the
hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they
are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my
children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them
among the dead."

He raised his hand high, toward the sun.

"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."

White Bird had taken a company and escaped to Canada. Colonel Miles
promised Chief Joseph that he would ask to have the surrendered people
sent back to the Nez Perces' country. Those were the terms. The
surrendered people numbered eighty-seven men, three hundred and
thirty-one women and children.

"Thus," reported General Sheridan, the head of the army, "has
terminated one of the most extraordinary Indian wars of which there is
any record. The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that
elicited universal praise; they abstained from scalping, let captive
women go free, did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful
families, which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill,
using advance and rear guards, skirmish lines and field fortifications."

The Government did not send the Chief Joseph Pierced Noses to their own
country. It was claimed that White Bird had broken the terms, by his
escape. At any rate, the Joseph people were kept a long, long time in
Indian Territory. Many of them sickened and died. They were mountain
Indians. They missed their cold streams and their pure air. They fell
away from over four hundred to two hundred and eighty.

Chief Joseph's heart broke utterly. He issued an appeal--his own
story--which was published in the _North American Review_ magazine, in
1879.

"If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in some country
where my people will not die so fast.... Let me be a free man--free to
travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade, where I choose; free
to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers,
free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey every law or
submit to the penalty."

No