The conferences held by Howard with the leaders, in May, made it clear to them that their alternatives were to emigrate to Lapwai or to fight. At first Howard thought they would yield. Looking Glass and White Bird picked out a site on the Clearwater to which the tribe agreed to remove at once; but just before the day fixed for the removal, the murder of one of the Indians near Mt. Idaho led to revenge directed against the whites and the massacre of several. War immediately followed, for the next two months covering the borderland of Idaho and Montana with confusion. A whole volume by General Howard has been devoted to its details. Chief Joseph himself discussed it in the _North American Review_ in 1879. Dunn has treated it critically in his _Massacres of the Mountains_, and the Montana Historical Society has published many articles concerning it. Considerably less is known of the more important wars which preceded it than of this struggle of the Nez Percés. In August the fighting turned to flight, Chief Joseph abandoning the Salmon River country and crossing into the Yellowstone Valley. In seventy-five days Howard chased him 1321 miles, across the Yellowstone Park toward the Big Horn country and the Sioux reserve. Along the swift flight there were running battles from time to time, while the fugitives replenished their stores and stock from the country through which they passed. Behind them Howard pressed; in their front Colonel Nelson A. Miles was ordered to head them off. Miles caught their trail in the end of September after they had crossed the Missouri River and had headed for the refuge in Canada which Sitting Bull had found. On October 3, 1877, he surprised the Nez Percé camp on Snake Creek, capturing six hundred head of stock and inflicting upon Joseph's band the heaviest blow of the war. Two days later the stubborn chief surrendered to Colonel Miles. "What shall be done with them?" Commissioner Hayt asked at the end of 1877. For once an Indian band had conducted a war on white principles, obeying the rules of war and refraining from mutilation and torture. Joseph had by his sheer military skill won the admiration and respect of his military opponents. But the murders which had inaugurated the war prevented a return of the tribe to Idaho. To exile they were sent, and Joseph's uprising ended as all such resistances must. The forcible invasion of the territory by the whites was maintained; the tribe was sent in punishment to malarial lands in Indian Territory, where they rapidly dwindled in number. There has been no adequate defence of the policy of the United States from first to last.