December 17, 2022

The Appaloosa

By roads-rus

The Appaloosa is a horse breed and the internet is loaded with information about them. I have spent the last few hours learning about them and adding to my notes about this horse breed. My interest in them stems from a visit to the Appaloosa Museum and Heritage Center in Moscow, ID on our most recent trip. It is a fascinating place with plenty of traffic. It makes going to this Idaho city a worthwhile activity when Ruth and I were in the area. This is an especially good place for the Appaloosa Museum to be because Moscow is in the Palouse. The recent killing of 4 university students here will be in the news far longer, but these are unlikely murders that, once solved, will fade in memory like the other multiple killings that have become far too common. The museum is in Moscow because the Appaloosa Horse Club (ApHC) is here and the Nez Perce Native Americans introduced this breed to the area.

The Appaloosa horse tends to be spotted somewhere on its body. Through the centuries they have been given names by many cultures. In China, for example, they are called mystical, celestial horses, People in Denmark call they knabstruppers. Austrians call them Lipizzaners, and they were owned by royalty. The Nez Perce Indians made them a familiar sight in the Palouse. Appaloosa has been a popular name for this breed since the late 1800s when this tribe introduced them to this region, They came to be called Appaloosas because the natives used this spotted horse to get around in the Palouse of Idaho and Washington. The Appaloosa became the Palouse horse associated with the Snake River and the Nez Perce villages that sprang up there.

They have been so common in France that they were included in cave paintings at Lascaux where they have been identified as the ancestors of the present-day spotted horse, The Shoshones used them too. We came to this museum on a Sunday morning because the main tourist attraction in Coeur d’ Alene. a 7-star alpaca ranch, was sold out for the day. The ice cream emporium in nearby Pullman, WA was not opened for sampling either its apple crisp ice cream or Huckleberry Ripple. The woman who ran this museum tried her darndest to find either treat for us available in Pullman on a Sunday. This was an impossible endeavor that, like the alpaca farm, will have to become looking-forward-to activities rather than accomplished.

We could have enjoyed any number of Washington apples, but we craved Huckleberry Ripple. This Appaloosa museum almost made up for the loss of the other 2 endeavors in the area until we can return.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2022 at 8:16 pm and posted in Great City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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