After the war Johnston sold insurance be-
fore winning election to the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1879. Six years later, he
was appointed railroad commissioner by
President Grover Cleveland and, while living
at Washington, D.C., befriended his former
antagonist, Sherman. Johnston also found
time to pen his memoirs and excoriated Davis
and others for losing the war. He died in
Washington, D.C., on March 21, 1891, from
pneumonia contracted while attending Sher-
man’s funeral.
Bibliography
Baumgarterner, Richard A.Kenesaw Mountain, June
1864: Bitter Standoff at the Gibraltar of Georgia.
Huntington, WV: Blue Acorn Press, 1998; Bradley,
Mark L. This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett
Place.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000; Connelly, Thomas L., and Archer Jones. The Pol-
itics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confeder-
ate Strategy.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1998; Davis, Stephen. Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe
Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions.Wil-
mington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001; Downs, Alan
C. “Gone Past All Redemption? The Early War Years
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Press, 1991; Newton, Steven H. Joseph E. Johnston
and the Defense of Richmond.Lawrence: University
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Craig L.Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography.
New York: Norton, 1992.JOSEPH
Joseph
(ca. 1840–September 21, 1904)
Nez Percé Chief
W
ith only a handful of warriors, Chief
Joseph and his band of 800 Nez
Percé conducted one of the most
epic retreats in military history. Crossing
1,700 miles of difficult terrain, they evaded 10
columns of army troops for four months and
beat them in 18 skirmishes. Within sight of
their goal, the Native Americans succumbed
only to exhaustion.
Joseph was born Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt
(Thunder Rolling Down from the Mountains)
in the Wallowa Valley, Oregon, around 1840,
the son of a Cayuse father and a Nez Percé
mother. His father, known as Chief Joseph the
Elder, was a Christian convert. In 1855, the
elder Joseph signed a treaty with the Ameri-
cans that ceded large tracts of their land to
settlement in exchange for the preservation
of their remaining homelands. This placated
settlers until 1861, when gold was discovered
in the Wallowa Valley and intense pressure
was placed on the Indians to sell off more
land. The elder Joseph flatly refused to com-
ply, and the threat of violence proved suffi-
cient, for the time being, to keep homestead-
ers off Indian lands. When his father died in
1871, the younger Joseph succeeded him.
Joseph also steadfastly refused to surrender