" Joseph returned home to the Colville an even greater hero in the public mind but no closer to achieving success in his quest to get his people back to the Wallowa. The American people, like the American government, were happy to lionize him as a symbol of the nation’s exotic frontier past, but they had no interest in seeing him as a person with a legitimate legal dispute in the present. "

― Kent Nerburn , Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy