The story is still being told — by the people who are the inheritors of everything that happened, by the historians and archaeologists and tribal cultural managers who study and preserve the evidence, by the NPS rangers who explain it to visitors, by the community members who ride the trail.

White Bird refused to surrender forty miles from Canada.

Then he covered the forty miles.

That is the story the headline promised.

The real story, as this article has tried to show, is larger than any headline and is still, in the most important sense, unfinished.

The Appaloosa And What It Represents

The nimíipuu horse — the spotted breed that has come to be called the Appaloosa, named after the Palouse River country where the nimíipuu bred them — is one of the most visible material connections between the nimíipuu of 1877 and the nimíipuu of the present.

The nimíipuu had been carefully breeding horses for generations by the time of 1877.