On September 21, 1877, Fort Benton commander Major Guido Ilges learned that the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) had crossed the Judith Basin headed for Canada. Thirteen members of Company F, Seventh Infantry Regiment, and two civilian volunteers loaded a mountain howitzer onto a steamboat and set off down the Missouri River, while thirty-eight volunteers and one soldier rode on horseback to protect Fort Claggett and the supplies at the Cow Island steamboat landing. They arrived too late. Before reaching Cow Island, Company F saw smoke and flames in the distance. Near Cow Creek, some Nimíipuu had confronted a supply wagon, taken the supplies they needed, and burned the rest. Outnumbered, the soldiers turned back to Fort Benton. In June 1877, after the U.S. Government ordered the Nimíipuu to leave their homes in northeastern Oregon and western Idaho and move to the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho, nearly 800 men, women, and children left their homelands in search of freedom. The U.S. military pursued them 1,179 miles across Idaho, through Yellowstone, and into Montana, where Colonel Nelson A. Miles's troops surrounded them at the Bear Paw, only forty miles from sanctuary in Canada. After five days of bitter cold and no food, Chief Joseph decided the people could last no longer. On October 5, as Chief White Bird fled across the border with the able-bodied, Joseph walked across the snowy plain, surrendered his rifle, and declared, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." Although some Nimíipuu escaped to Canada, Joseph and those who remained were exiled to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. After eight years, survivors of the brutal conditions in exile were allowed to return to reservations in the Northwest in 1885.