It was love at first sight, the following summer Joseph and Ta-ma-al-we-non-my were wedded. Joseph lived in peace until gold was discovered in the Bitterroot Mountains, a region to the north inside the Nez Perce reservation by white prospectors in August of 1860. By the fall of 1861 more than 6,000 prospectors had encroached on the Nez Perce's territory. For a while Chief Joseph did not worry about the miners believing that they would only be on their land for a short time then move on, however this was not the case. Instead more and more miners began to show up on the Nez Perce Territory; by 1863 30,000 non-Indians had entered their reservation and carried of more than fifteen million dollars worth of gold. To fix this problem before it got any worse the U.S. government decided to see if they could purchase the land on which the miners had settled from the Nez Perce. .
A new treaty was reached in 1863, which reduced the size of the Nez Perce land by 6,932,270 acres; this was a controversial treaty because not all of the chiefs agreed to this, especially Joseph. The treaty was called the "Thief Treaty" by many of the Indians who refused to sign it and had their land taken from them. Joseph and his people were forced to move on to a new reservation where each family would only have 20 acres between them. .
On January 6,1877, John B. Monteith the Indian agent at the time ordered Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce band to move off their land and onto a crowded Idaho reservation by the 1863 treaty. The government did not want to move Joseph but they thought that it was what had to be done to prevent a confrontation between the Indians and the newly moved in settlers. Chief Joseph tried to negotiate with General Oliver Otis Howard in order to persuade him to allow the Nez Perce to stay on their ancestral land. He was successful in delaying the inevitable move of the Nez Perce for a short period.
