Merlo Station High School
Beaverton, Oregon

The Nez Perce Appaloosa:
A Living Link to the Lewis & Clark Expedition

On March 18, 2000, ten of us--all Merlo Station High School students from Beaverton, Oregon--visited Rudy Shebala, Coordinator of the Young Horseman Project at his ranch headquarters in Sweetwater, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Lapwai Reservation. We visited Rudy because we wanted to learn more about the Appaloosa horse--a breed of horse which Lewis & Clark greatly admired.

Seeing Rudy was like seeing an old friend. The previous summer, he and his Nez Perce students had taken us on a horse ride near Winchester Lake, Idaho. This experience had enriched our two-week field research project along the entire 1500 mile Nez Perce National Historic Trail from Oregon to Montana. Before taking us on our ride, Rudy explained how the history of the Appaloosa horse and the Nez Perces were intimately connected with Lewis & Clark--and to the eventual warfare between white settlers and Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest.

Through his work, Rudy is helping to preserve Nez Perce culture and the tribal tradition of superior horse breeding and training techniques first chronicled by Lewis & Clark during their difficult passage through Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains.

On Feb. 15, 1806, Meriwether Lewis wrote that the Nez Perce horses ". . .appear to be of an excellent race; they are lofty, elegantly formed, active and durable."

In 1995, a writer for Spur, ( a magazine that publishes articles about horse breeds from the around the world, said:

The credit for the development of a distinctive spotted breed, the Appaloosa, has to be given to the Nez Perce Indians of North America who lived in the Pacific Northwest. Their lands included the valley of the Palouse River after which the horses were named. . .

In 1877, the tribe and it's horses were almost exterminated as United States troops seized the tribal lands. However, the breed was revived in 1938 when the Appaloosa Horse Club was formed in Moscow, Idaho. The Nez Perces weren't the first tribe to obtain horses after the Spanish introduced these animals to the New World, but historians regard this tribe to be the first Native Americans to breed selectively for specific traits, such as speed, endurance, and intelligence. As Lewis & Clark observed with chagrin, the Nez Perces kept their best horses for themselves; the less desirable ones were either traded or gelded. Also, the Nez Perces were shocked that Lewis & Clark and their men ate horses. Apparently, the tribe didn't want to eat such an exalted animal. "Lewis and Clark didn't understand how horses fit into Nez Perce culture," said student Doug Cook. "They didn't have any understanding of Native American spirituality and how horses were part of those spiritual beliefs. To Lewis and Clark, horses were either transportation or just another source of protein."

While Rudy explained about his program, all of us worked hard next to him for three hours helping to muck out the stalls and feed the horses. Rudy explained that officials from the Department of Interior were visiting him on Monday, and he wanted to "spruce up" everything. As we worked, a steady rain turned everything to mud. In an adjacent meadow, a large herd of horses galloped and whinnied beneath the gray sky. Listening to Rudy's calm voice and the steady hoofbeats of his horses made time pass with a dream-like quality, and as we worked, it was possible for us to imagine a different world--one that had disappeared quickly after Lewis & Clark's contact with the Nez Perces enabled white missionaries and settlers to pour into the Pacific Northwest. But 2 all our studies with the Nez Perces had taught us that this lost world still existed in both memory and spirit. We knew that the Nez Perces would never forget what they had lost.

Rudy, who has been hired by the Nez Perce Tribe as an expert horse breeder, is an enrolled Navajo. He lives with his Nez Perce wife Shirley in the nearby community of Kooskia, Idaho. Rudy and Shirley have three sons: Sonsela, Notah, and Hohots; and two daughters: Lautiss and Timena.

"The Nez Perce kinda got stuck with people thinking the tribe started the Appaloosa line," said Rudy, who wears his hair in two braids and speaks in a quiet but authoritative voice. He explained that Appaloosas--or different breeds of spotted horses-can be traced back 20,000 years through ancient European and Asian art.

Traditionally, the Nez Perces didn't use the word Appaloosa. To them, their spotted horse was known as the Maumin. When Lewis & Clark first encountered the Nez Perces, Rudy said, the Maumin were a superior breed of horse. Since that time, because of war, diseases, and domination by the European/American cultures, the Maumin has suffered genetically.

Rudy said that in January of 1995, the Nez Perce Tribe decided to take some positive action, acquiring four purebred Ahkal-Teke stallions and two purebred Ahkal-Teke mares. The Ahkal-Teke is the purest strain of the ancient Turkmene horse from the steppes of central Asia and possess many of the superior traits of the original Maumin breed. Currently, the largest population of the Ahkal-Teke horse is north of Iran, in Turkmenistan.

Rudy explained that the Nez Perce Tribe began to selectively breed these horses with the Maumin. As a result of the breeding program, this unique breed of horse is being sold through the Nez Perce Horse Registry. Each Nez Perce horse is priced at approximately $5,000. These sales are a great economic benefit to the tribe. There have been many successful offspring from the mixing of the two horse breeds. Some recent ones include Lapwai Cloud Burst and Lochsa, fillies born in 1999.

In the 1995 First Nations Development Institute Bi-Annual Report, Rudy was quoted as saying this about the cross-breeding program: "It's an experiment. There are risks. It's easier to go along with the modern Appaloosa than stick your neck out. Any time Indians do something for themselves, it's going to be tough. But we feel we have something to offer and something to stick with."

"The real purpose of all this," Rudy explained, "is to show the young people that we were once a proud horse culture. The Nez Perces can be that way again. It gives our children something to dream about, to hope for. Lewis & Clark saw a strong people with strong horses a long time ago. Maybe sometime in the future people will get to see something like that again."

Student Amanda M. summed up what she learned from the visit to the Young Horseman Program. "It was beautiful to see how these horses are a living connection to history," she said. "These are the horses that helped save the lives of the men in the Lewis & Clark Expedition. These horses helped ensure the expansion of our culture into the American West."

Student writer: Rachel J.

• What Lewis and Clark learned about Nez Perce horse culture
  
• Photos

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