Paw Mountain, in the Montana Hills, it was not because they were beaten, but because, as Joseph says, “I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer; we had lost enough already. * * * We could have escaped from Bear Paw Mountain if we had left our wounded, old women and children, behind. We were unwilling to do this. We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering while in the hands of white men. * * * I believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered. I have heard that he has been censured for making the promise to return us to Lapwai. He could not have made any other terms with me at that time. I could have held him in check until my friends came to my assistance, and then neither of the generals nor their soldiers would ever have left Bear Paw Mountain alive. On the fifth day I went to General Miles and gave up my gun, and said, ‘From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more.’ My people needed rest; we wanted peace.”
The terms of this surrender were shamefully violated. Joseph and his band were taken first to Fort Leavenworth and then to the Indian Territory. At Leavenworth they were placed in the river bottom, with no water but the river water to drink.
“Many of my people sickened and died, and we buried them in this strange land,” says Joseph, “I cannot tell how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth. The Great Spirit Chief who rules above seemed to be looking some other way, and did not see what was being done to my people.”
Yet with a marvellous magnanimity, and a clear-headed sense of justice of which few men would be capable under the circumstances, Joseph says: “I believe General Miles would have kept his word if he could have done so. I do not blame him for what we have suffered since the surrender. I do not know who is to blame. We gave up all our horses, over eleven hundred, and all our saddles, over one hundred, and we have not heard from them since. Somebody has got our horses.”
