Why did Nez Perce Chief Joseph twice travel to Washington, D.C. and meet with Presidents Rutherford Hayes and a few years later with Teddy Roosevelt?

Nez Perce Chief Joseph (1840-1904) was a leader of the Wal-lam-Wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe living in the Pacific Northwest in the later part of the 19th century.

Chief Joseph led his band of Nez Perce during the most tumultuous period in their history, when they were forcibly removed by the United States federal government from their ancestral lands in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon onto a significantly reduced reservation in the Idaho Territory.

In 1879, Chief Joseph went to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Rutherford Hayes and plead his people's case to leave the Idaho reservation and return to the homeland in the Pacific Northwest. Finally in 1885, he and his people were granted permission to return to the Pacific Northwest to settle on another reservation around Kooskia, Idaho. Instead they were taken to the Colville Indian Reservation in Nespelem, Washington, far from both their homelands in the Wallowa Valley.

Again in 1903, Chief Joseph visited President Theodoore Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. to again petition the government. Everywhere he went, it was to make a plea for what remained of his people to be returned to their home in the Wallowa Valley, but it never happened.

An indomitable voice of conscience, in September 1904, still in exiled from his homeland, Chief Joseph died, according to his doctor, "of a broken heart". His family buried their Chief near the village of Nespelem, Washington.