In 1885, after eight years as prisoners of war in Kansas and Indian Territory, the surviving Nimiipuu of the 1877 war were sent back to the Northwest. At Wallula they were split: 118 went on to Lapwai, and Joseph, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, was sent with 149 others to the Colville Reservation. The bands already living there did not want them, and troops came from Fort Spokane before they could be settled on Nespelem Creek. Joseph went back to see the Wallowa twice, in 1899 and 1900, was heard out politely by the men who held it, and was told he could not come home.
He died sitting before the fire in his lodge on September 21, 1904, and the agency doctor reported that he had died of a broken heart. On June 20, 1905, his body was taken up and reburied here with ceremony, under a white marble shaft seven and a half feet tall carved with his likeness and his name, the gift of the Washington University State Historical Society. Edmond Meany, the University of Washington professor who had written his master's thesis on Joseph and brought him to Seattle in 1903, spoke at the grave, and Yellow Bull spoke for the Nez Perce.
Others who came through the war lie around him, Yellow Wolf among them, whose stone records that it was placed by white friends. The cemetery is listed on the National Register as the Chief Joseph Memorial, but it is a Nez Perce burial ground still in use, on reservation land: come as a guest, keep to the paths, and leave what you find at the graves as you found it. The Joseph band remains one of the twelve confederated bands of the Colville tribes.
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