The people will be returned to Idaho.

The army wants to quit fighting.

These terms were not nothing.

They addressed the most immediate fears: that the leaders would be executed and that the people would be permanently separated from their homeland.

The assurance that they would be returned to Idaho, specifically, was significant — it addressed the most fundamental loss of the entire 1877 crisis, which was not the fighting itself but the threat of permanent displacement from everything they knew.

Joseph and White Bird, according to the historical accounts, had different responses to these assurances.