American Leopard Horses Arrived 500 Years Ago

Leopard-Spotted Horses Have Ancient Lineage in Europe and Asia

Nov 3, 2009

The history of the spotted horse in North America goes back more than 500 years to the arrival of the horses brought by Spanish explorers.

Horses with white coats covered with leopard spots are ancient. Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe depict wild horses with dark spots on a white base coat.

Thousands of years later, these “leopard” horses became very popular with the European upper class. Even the Spanish Riding School’s famous Lipizzaner horses once came in this colour. In Asia, leopard horses were called “heavenly horses” and were highly prized.

Leopard Horses Come to America

When the Spanish arrived in America, they brought fine horses, some of which were leopard. The Spaniards lost horses to the wild on a regular basis as the animals escaped or were stolen by native people, and eventually vast herds of wild horses roamed central and western North America. In them flowed the genes for the leopard coat pattern.

But how did so many horses spread as far as Oregon and Idaho, where the Nez Perce people (who called themselves the Ni Mii Pu, meaning The People) practiced selective breeding for spotted horses? When explorers Meriweather Lewis saw the high-quality spotted horses of the Nez Perce in 1806, he was surprised by the numbers, the colours and the high quality of the horses. He also noted that, except for their colour, they looked more like eastern Thoroughbreds than like Spanish horses or Mustangs.

How could this be? According to Nez Perce oral tradition, Russian traders brought spotted horses to the coast of Oregon in the 1600s. These may have been descendants of the eastern “heavenly horses”. This story is backed up by a Blackfoot man named Shaved Head, who in the 1940s told ethnologist John C. Ewers that his tribe got horses from the Nez Perce in Oregon, who told him that they had “taken their horses out of the water”. Perhaps that meant their original animals came from a coastal shipwreck or from a seafaring trader.

Such an incident would certainly increase the percentage of animals carrying the leopard gene in the American northwest and might explain how the western herds grew so large from a small stock of Spanish horses, and why the Nez Perce horses included so many leopards when the colour was almost unheard of east of the Rocky Mountains..

Appaloosa Horses

Since the Nez Perce lived near the Palouse River, their colourful horses became known as Palouses or Appaloosas. Most were patterned in what is called the Appaloosa complex: leopard, blanket, varnish roan and snowflake. Appaloosas were selectively bred for stamina, speed, intelligence, good temperament and beauty.

In 1877, Chief Joseph led nearly 800 Nez Perce people and 3,000 horses (about half of them Appaloosas) north to Canada to avoid confinement on a government reservation. Their Appaloosas kept them ahead of the American cavalry until just short of the border, where they were caught and sent back. The government promptly confiscated their horses and either shot them or had them bred to farm draught horses. Fortunately, ranchers knew the value of the Appaloosa horses and saved some, and some Native people managed to hang onto their spotted horses.

In the 1930s, a club was formed to restore the breed. There were few true Appaloosas left, so the new Appaloosa registry permitted crossing with Arab, Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred horses. But what began as a temporary measure continued. By the 1990s, many “Appaloosas” had very little Appaloosa blood.

American Leopard Horses

Some breeders disagreed with club policy, and set out to breed only Appaloosa to Appaloosa with little outcrossing. They found that leopard bred to leopard produced a much higher percentage of spotted foals with all the other Appaloosa characteristics: striped hoofs, white eye sclera and spotted skin. And the colours were eye-popping. Even the mares, traditionally less colourful, had big, bright spots.

At his American Leopard Horse Ranch in Lainghsburg, Michigan, the late Frank Scripter spent three decades breeding only leopard horses descended from the original Nez Perce stock. Selecting for working ability and soundness as well as colour, he succeeded in creating a pure strain of leopard Appaloosas. Today, some horses from his bloodlines have nothing but leopard Appaloosas in their pedigrees for 10 generations.

Now, other ranches are continuing Scripter’s breeding program and preserving other old leopard Appaloosa bloodlines. Thanks to these dedicated breeders, the original leopard horses of the Nez Perce are no longer threatened with extinction.

Sources

Dolenc, Dr. Milan. Lipizzaner: The Story of the Horses of Lipica. (English Translation) St. Paul, Minnesota: Control Data Arts, 1981. Originally published by Mladinska Knjiga, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia.

Ewers, John C. The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 159. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1955.

Howard, Robert West. The Horse in America. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1965.

Kays, D.J. The Horse: Judging—Breeding—Feeding—Management—Selling. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1969.

Podhajsky, Col. A. The Spanish Riding School of Vienna. Vienna, Austria: Bruder Rosenbaum, 1964.

Richardson, Bill and Dona. The Appaloosa. North Hollywood, California: Wilshire Book Company, 1971.

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