Chained promises not passing on rejection

I am have a problem understanding why rejections are not passed on through a promise chain and I am hoping someone will be able to help me understand why. To me, attaching functionality to a chain of promises implies an intent that I am depending on an original promise to be fulfilled. It's hard to explain, so let me show a code example of my problem first. (Note: this example is using Node and the deferred node module. I tested this with Dojo 1.8.3 and had the same results)

var d = require("deferred");

var d1 = d();

var promise1 = d1.promise.then(
    function(wins) { console.log('promise1 resolved'); return wins;},
    function(err) { console.log('promise1 rejected'); return err;});
var promise2 = promise1.then(
    function(wins) { console.log('promise2 resolved'); return wins;},
    function(err) { console.log('promise2 rejected'); return err;});
var promise3 = promise2.then(
    function(wins) { console.log('promise3 resolved'); return wins;},
    function(err) { console.log('promise3 rejected'); return err;});
d1.reject(new Error());

The results of running this operation is this output:

promise1 rejected
promise2 resolved
promise3 resolved

Okay, to me, this result doesn't make sense. By attaching to this promise chain, each then is implying the intent that it will be dependant upon the successful resolution of d1 and a result being passed down the chain. If the promise in promise1 doesn't receive the wins value, but instead gets an err value in its error handler, how is it possible for the next promise in the chain to have its success function called? There is no way it can pass on a meaningful value to the next promise because it didn't get a value itself.

A different way I can describe what I'm thinking is: There are three people, John, Ginger, and Bob. John owns a widget shop. Ginger comes into his shop and requests a bag of widgets of assorted colours. He doesn't have them in