reopening it to white settlement.

reopening it to white settlement.

In May. 1877, Chief Joseph was given 30 days to move his people to a reservation. With a combined force that numbered 250 warriors with 450 noncombatants, their baggage and 2,000 horses, the Indians struck out instead for the Bitterroot Mountains and freedom in Canada with Sitting Bull's Sioux.

For 1,300 miles, the Nez Perces eluded the entire Army of the Northwest before Chief Joseph, seeing his people with no blankets and no food in the midst of a blizzard, surrendered, vowing that “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Only a small band ‘of unyielding warriors escaped on foot, reaching the Canadian border two days later.

Instead of being conducted to the Lapwai reservation. Chief Joseph and his people were shipped like cattle to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and confined on a swampy bottomland as prisoners of war—without their beloved Appaloosas.

“The Army was afraid of that breed of horse. There was nothing around that could compete with them. They were afraid of the Indians having them." Mauri maintained. The horses that Lewis and Clarke had reported to be as good as the Virginia thoroughbred were taken from the Nez Perces and distributed among local farmers and ranchers.

The Indians had followed a strict breeding program with their spotted . ponies, immediately gelding or spaying any horse that showed a flaw* in conformation or disposition. Decades of careful work had developed animals that bred true and filled the Nez Perces’ Wallowa Valley every spring with spotted babies trailing behind spotted mamas. That program died with the Indians at Leavenworth.

Bred To Anything

"Once the U. S. government got hold of them and sold them to farmers." they were bred to anything that came down the road.” Mauri said. Roman , noses and ewe necks replaced the classic Appaloosa lines. Legs thickened and feet splayed, the result of an influx of draft horse blood, and color genes got mixed with black, bay and chestnut.

"People who knew what the breed was when the Nez Perces had Appaloosas were disgusted with what the government had done to them."