After the wrong was consummated, when Joseph was permitted to go to Washington and talk to our wise men, he said, "I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They can not tell me." That question will never be answered. In his report of September, 1875, Gen. O. O. Howard said, "I think it a great mistake to take from Joseph and his band of Nez Perces Indians that (the Wallowa) valley. The white people really do not want it. They wish to be bought out. I think gradually this valley will be abandoned by the white people, and possibly Congress can be induced to let these really peaceable Indians have this poor valley for their own." Lieut.-Col. H. Clay Wood was another member of the commission who, in his report of August 1, 1876, on "The Status of young Joseph and his band of Nez Perces Indians," gave his opinion that the Government had so far failed to comply with its agreements in the treaty of 1855; that none of the Nez Perces were bound by it. He also made a minority report as commissioner, recommending that although Joseph's band would have to be moved eventually, yet that, "until Joseph commits some overt act of hostility, force should not be used to put him upon any reservation." The other members of the commission, D. H. Jerome, William Stickney and A. C. Barstow, must have made a very different report, for certain it is, the Department of the Interior, acting on its recommendations, ordered the non-treaties to be placed on the Lapwai reservation. By virtue of his office as commander of that district, General Howard was the agent to enforce this order. He met the non-treaties in May, and found, as he must have anticipated, that they were unwilling to go on the reservation. General Howard held three councils with the malcontent Indians at Fort Lapwai, the station of the Indian agency for the Nez Perces reservation, said to be the loveliest valley of Idaho. The last of these councils, that of May 7, 1877, was indeed a stormy session. The principal speaker on this occasion was Too-Hool-Hool-Suit, who was a dreamer as well as a prophet, priest and chief. He taught that the earth having been created by God in its completeness, should not be interfered with, disturbed or improved by man, and that if the Indians continued steadfast in their belief, a great leader would be raised up in the East, at a single blast of whose trumpet all the dead warriors would start suddenly into life, and that the millions of braves thus collected would expel the white man from the continent of America, and repossess it for their own dusky race. The old dreamer was a man of great importance and remarkable influence among the Indians.