Chief Joseph, also known as Hinmahtohyahlatkekt (which has been translated as Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain, or Thunder Coming Up Over the Land From the Water), was born in 1840, the second son of a Nez Perce chief, Old Joseph.

In 1877, when the U.S. military forced Chief Joseph's people off their lands in the Wallowa Valley of eastern Oregon, Chief Joseph helped to lead some seven hundred and fifty men, women, and children on a seventeen-hundred-mile fighting retreat toward Canada. In October of that year, Chief Joseph and those remaining Nez Perce were forced to surrender after intense fighting in the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, fewer than forty miles south of the Canadian border. There, he gave his now-famous surrender speech.

Chief Joseph and approximately four hundred Nez Perce Indians were taken captive and moved to Oklahoma and Kansas, where they were held...