PALOUSE

The Appaloosa breed of horse, with its distinctive spotted coat and its renowned intelligence, speed, and stamina, is named after one of the tribes that developed the breed—the Palouse. Members of this tribe occupied ancestral territory along the Palouse River on lands that now include parts of eastern Washington State and northern Idaho. Horses, brought to North America by the Spanish, reached this part of North America by the early 1700s, after which the Palouse, NEZ PERCE, CAYUSE, and other tribes of the region became famous as horse breeders and horse traders.

The Palouse, or Palus (both pronounced puh-LOOS), are thought to have once been one people with the YAKAMA, another tribe speaking a dialect of the Sahapt-ian language family, part of the Penutian phylum. They also had close ties with the Nez Perce. It was among the Nez Perce that the Lewis and Clark Expedition first saw Appaloosa horses in 1805. These tribes and others on the Columbia Plateau depended heavily on fishing in the many rivers draining toward the Pacific Ocean, and they are considered part of the Plateau Culture Area (see PLATEAU INDIANS).

The Palouse played an important part in the heavy fur trade among whites and the tribes of the American Northwest during the first half of the 1800s. But with increased non-Indian settlement by the mid-1800s, the Palouse joined other tribes in their stand for ancestral lands. Palouse warriors fought as allies to the Cayuse and COEUR d’alene in the Cayuse War of 1847—50 and the Coeur d’Alene War of 1858.

The Palouse as a tribe declined to lead the reservation life forced on many tribes of the region. Some individuals did, however, join their Sahaptian kinspeo-ple on reservations, in particular the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington established in 1872. In 2001, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation approved a reservation-wide Integrated Resource Management Plan to guide the management of resources on the approximately 1.4 million acres of tribal lands.