Connection

UO Libraries Connect Umatilla Tribes to Their Past

More than 110 years ago, a government agent on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon, took up photography as a hobby. Over three decades, Major Lee Moorhouse would photograph wheat farmers, bull riders, steamboats on the Columbia, famous visitors, Chinese laborers, and many Native Americans. He became a worldwide celebrity, best known for an 1892 photograph of twin Cayuse babies in papoose boards.

The 2,300 people on the reservation today descend from the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Indians who posed for Moorhouse’s camera. Many of them have never seen the bulk of the photographs.

“We have a few images, but not too many,” says Dallas Dick, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla, whose family has lived on the reservation since the 1855 treaty that established it.

So Dallas, an archival assistant at the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, is excited to be involved in a project with the UO Libraries Special Collections to select, catalog, digitize, describe, and provide website access to 200 images from the Moorhouse collection, which was donated to the university in 1928.

The pilot project, the first phase of a Special Collections documentary archive on the history of the Northwest, is funded with a $20,000 grant from the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium.