With war now actually begun, three columns were sent into the field to arrest and restrain the hostile Sioux. Of the three commanders, Cook, Gibbon, and Custer, the last-named was the most romantic of fighters. He was already well known for his Cheyenne campaigns and his frontier book. Sherman had described him in 1867 as "young, _very_ brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer," and as "ready and willing now to fight the Indians." La Barge, who had carried some of Custer's regiment on his steamer _De Smet_, in 1873, saw him as "an officer ... clad in buckskin trousers from the seams of which a large fringe was fluttering, red-topped boots, broad sombrero, large gauntlets, flowing hair, and mounted on a spirited animal." His showy vanity and his admitted courage had already got him into more than one difficulty; now on June 25, 1876, his whole column of five companies, excepting only his battle horse, Comanche, and a half-breed scout, was destroyed in a battle on the Little Big Horn. If Custer had lived, he might perhaps have been cleared of the charge of disobedience, as Fetterman might ten years before, but, as it turned out, there were many to lay his death to his own rashness. The war ended before 1876 was over, though Sitting Bull with a small band escaped to Canada, where he worried the Dominion Government for several years. "I know of no instance in history," wrote Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, "where a great nation has so shamelessly violated its solemn oath." The Sioux were crushed, their Black Hills were ceded, and the disappointed tribes settled down to another decade of quiescence. In 1877 the interest which had made Sitting Bull a hero in the Centennial year was transferred to Chief Joseph, leader of the non-treaty Nez Percés, in the valley of the Snake. This tribe had been a friendly neighbor of the overland migrations since the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Living in the valleys of the Snake and its tributaries, it could easily have hindered the course of travel along the Oregon trail, but the disposition of its chiefs was always good. In 1855 it had begun to treat with the United States and had ceded considerable territory at the conference held by Governor Stevens with Chief Lawyer and Chief Joseph.