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Chief Joseph - Nez Perce

Many Spirit Guides have played a part in Dan’s progression along his spiritual pathway and he would not be able to do the work for the Spirit World that he does without their help.  The most famous being Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé.

Chief Joseph was born around 1840 in the Wallowa Valley of what is now northeastern Oregon. His given name was Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, meaning "Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain." However, he was widely known as Joseph, or Joseph the Younger, because his father had taken the Christian name Joseph when he was baptized at the Lapwai mission by Henry Spalding in 1838.  Under the leadership Joseph the Elder', the powerful Nez Percé tribe was friendly to whites and Joseph the Younger was educated at a mission school.

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In 1855 Joseph the Elder helped Washington's territorial governor set up a Nez Percé reservation that stretched from Oregon into Idaho. But in 1863, ollowing a gold rush into Nez Percé territory, the federal government took back almost six million acres of this land, restricting the Nez Percé to a reservation in Idaho that was only one tenth its prior size. Feeling betrayed, Joseph the Elder denounced the United States, destroyed his American flag and his Bible, and refused to move his band from the Wallowa Valley or sign the treaty that would make the new reservation boundaries official.

When Joseph the Elder died in 1871, Joseph the Younger was chosen to succeed him. He inherited an increasingly volatile situation as a growing number of white settlers arrived in the Wallowa Valley.