Stunning ‘900 Horses’ Mural Honors Dark Moment in Native American Horse History
A temporary but painstakingly created community art project honors one of the Pacific Northwest’s most gruesome tragedies.
On this day, September 8, 185
Stunning ‘900 Horses’ Mural Honors Dark Moment in Native American Horse History
A temporary but painstakingly created community art project honors one of the Pacific Northwest’s most gruesome tragedies.
On this day, September 8, 1858 the Palouse Tribesmen of what is now Washington State looked across a horizon that just hours earlier had been the holding grounds of their beloved horses and saw one of the most devastating sights imaginable. The sounds of restless hooves and swishing tails had been replaced by agonizing silence when U.S. Army Colonel George Wright ordered the systematic destruction of the tribe’s entire herd. It’s estimated that between 800 to 1,000 horses were killed, and it had taken Wright’s men almost 2 whole days to complete the deed.
According to primary documents, the act had been done as punishment for the “murder of white settlers.” The truth is more complicated; two prospectors had entered a territory of eastern Washington that they had been explicitly forbidden to enter by the U.S. government because of loose and ultimately hollow agreements with local tribes. Their entrance into this territory sparked a conflict and the prospectors were killed (it’s possible that Native Americans also died in this conflict, but there is no record of that. We do know that dozens of tribesmen had been killed in previous skirmishes with the invading Army that year.)
In retaliation, Colonel Wright ordered that the horses, as well as their feed and shelters, be destroyed. This kind of destruction was absolutely shattering to a Pacific Northwest tribe in that era. Horses were not only critical to transportatio