White Bird chose this precariousness over surrender.

He is documented to have remained in Canada until his death around 1882.

He never went home.

The Wallowa Valley And What Was Never Resolved

Joseph’s band was from the Wallowa Valley, the mountain-rimmed country of northeastern Oregon that Old Joseph had specifically instructed his son never to surrender.

When Young Joseph signed the surrender terms at Bear Paw, he was not legally surrendering the Wallowa Valley — the 1877 conflict was about the army’s insistence on reservation confinement, not a treaty that would have transferred land.

But the practical consequence of the surrender, and of the years of exile that followed, was that the Wallowa Valley continued to be occupied and developed by settler farmers and ranchers.