Talk:Cayuse horse

contact info not permitted
I removed this during my tidy-up; including it here because for now "you" are the only source; see WP:RS and WP:MOS.
 * '' For additional information contact Jeff Edwards, Wild Horse Research Center, 248 N. Main Street, Porterville, California 93257

As in my edit summary, great addition, but needs to be properly cited from reliable, verifiable sources (publications, certain kinds of websites, news copy etc.). I'd be curious if you know anything about the BC variety "cayoosh", which sounds the same thing but I was under the impression was only a Lillooet-Chilcotin-Cariboo area breed, maybe it's just the word-form that's only local....and have you heard of teh Chilcotin horses, now contained more or less to an area known as the Brittany Triangle, northeast of Chilko Lake? If not, you may find teh writings of Paul St. Pierre very worthwhile, also a book called Chiwid by Sage Birchwater of Tatlayoko Lake, publ. I think Transmontanus Books, Vancouver, which has a fairly detailed account of the Chilcotin horse kill of the 1930s and '40s-50s, when the feral horses of the Chilcotin were threatening to wipe out the ungulate population and also cattle grazing fodder because of their heavy grazing, and a bounty was placed on them to reduce their numbers, now threatened by extensive logging in the region....for a while the largest mustang-type population of horses on the continent, I think.....I imagine they're cayuse/cayoosh by strain but don't know much more than what i read in St. Pierre adn Birchwater.....interesting stuff if you're a horse specialist, I'd say, esp. if you hadn't heard of it before....Skookum1 (talk) 17:02, 4 January 2009 (UTC)


 * There appear to be a lot of sub-groups of what are basically Mustangs, often genetically isolated, sometimes developing unique traits. The big problem is sorting out when we are actually talking about a true "breed" and when we are talking about a band of 50 horses that simply bred in isolation.  It's kind of like all the horse populations on the barrier islands on the east coast--the Chincoteague pony and such -- probably fairly common ancestors, but divergence due to habitat and genetic isolation...fascinating history in any case.   Montanabw (talk) 06:06, 5 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I'd only seen the address at the end, so that's all I removed; as for the rest of teh history before that it's quite plausible, esp. the Percheron origin as I've seen the "cayoosh" in teh area I'm from in BC, though usually in quarterhorses not "pure cayoosh", ifsuch a thing exists. I've asked an equine person in BC for some further input, as tehre may be some "formal" writings on this; Paul St. Pierre does make some comments about the origin of the Chilcotin mountain pony and/or the cayoosh (not necessarily the same thing, I'm not sure) and the Brittany Triangle mustangs aren't necessarily of that strain; the first horses in the Chilcotin adn Lillooet countries weren't introduced until teh early 19th Century (by invasion in the case of the Lillooet Country, by trade and ranching in the case of the Chilcotin); the term cayoosh so far as I know isn't used in parts of BC farther east adn southeast, which is the direction they came in from, though "cayuse" is; though in Indian dialects of English that final-s is typi8cally "-sh" anyway.  Somewhere out there there's an academic paper tracing the Spanish origin of the term (from caballo, with one variant being cayuse the other being the usual Chinook Jargon term for horse, kiuatan, with -tan being a tpyical Sahaptin ending.)  Anyway I'll be back if/when my friend comes up with any published inforamtion he may have; and maybe Mr. Edwards has some US-side publications he's based his material on and will provide the citations....Skookum1 (talk) 14:06, 5 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Frankly, much of the information placed in the article was not supported by research. I can agree that in addition to the slang, there are some people who claim there is a "cayuse horse" that might be a separate strain of horse from the Spanish Mustang, Kiger Mustang, etc.,  but I also need links to real organizations and not a one-man preservation effort for badly-conformed, inbred horses.  (For one thing, a "long cannon bone" is actually a serious conformation fault!)  =:-O   There are a lot of feral horse populations where later settlers turned loose draft horses with Mustang herds during the late 19th century in hopes of producing cheap farm horses-- and also deliberately to degrade the stock of the Indian people in a misguided attempt to make them into farmers.  The text here was a wholesale copy and paste (thus  copyvio) from the often-iffy Oklahoma state site, and its content there is inaccurate in sourcing their material to the International Museum of the Horse, as IMH does not have an article or listing for the "breed"  at all.  See http://www.imh.org/museum/breeds.php?pageid=8   I'm not opposed to looking at legitimate information on this "breed" if there really is one, but what was put in here isn't going to work; it's romance, not research ... light riding-type horses were in the Pacific Northwest prior to 1800, for one thing, but draft horses didn't get out there until much later. I began by tagging as {[dubious}} everything that is contadicted by other source material, but it wound up being every other sentence, so I just chopped it all for now.   Montanabw (talk) 19:24, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Britannica entry, and mention in Don't Fence Me In (song)
This is the full text of Cayuse (breed of horse) entry from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/100847/Cayuse :

"Cayuse, in full Cayuse Indian pony,  North American wild or tame horse, descended from horses taken to the New World by the Spanish in the 16th century. The small and stocky horse had become a distinct breed by the 19th century. It was named for the Cayuse people of eastern Washington and Oregon. Although its ancestry has been difficult to establish with certainty, it is thought to have descended from Spanish Barb horses taken to the New World by the Spanish in the 16th century and to have been crossbred with Percherons, draft horses from France that had been imported by French Canadians. The Cayuse is notable for its combination of speed and endurance. In the 21st century the breed was relatively rare."

The word cayuse is used in Don't Fence Me In (song).

I don't have time at the moment to incorporate this info into the article. Anyone is welcome to take this on of course.

FrankSier (talk) 19:33, 10 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Britannica isn't much use on wiki, we need additional, better sources. The Britannica entry itself is inaccurate in calling them "wild," which is incorrect, as all horses in the USA descend from domesticated stock and therefore, at best, are "feral."  There were regional names given to some Mustang strains, but as far as a true breed profile, we need better info.   Montanabw (talk) 03:18, 11 January 2012 (UTC)