Collection is open for research.
Photo Acc. 00D025 and Photo Acc. 00U025
The collection is arranged in three series:
Thomas Leeander Moorhouse (1850-1926), known as Major Lee Moorhouse, was an amateur photographer from Pendleton, Oregon. In 1878, he served as field secretary for Oregon Governor Stephen F. Chadwick during the Bannock-Paiute War, and the following year, he was appointed to the Third (Eastern Oregon) Brigade of the Oregon State Militia, in which he earned the rank of major. Moorhouse also owned a mercantile business in Pendleton, Moorhouse & Livermore (later Lee Moorhouse and Co.), and served one term as mayor of the city in 1885. From 1889 to 1891, he was employed as the agent to the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
Moorhouse began taking photographs around 1897-1898. During a period when many amateur photographers were experimenting with new innovations in film negatives and snapshot photography, Moorhouse used glass plate negatives to capture his subjects. He took more than 9,000 images, photographing the activities of his hometown of Pendleton and, especially, Native American life in the Columbia River basin and Umatilla County.
Lee Moorhouse photographs, Org. Lot 104, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
This collection was reprocessed in March 2006 to include photographs from this accession that had previously been separated and cataloged individually. Minor revisions were made to the collection guide in June 2024 to conform to current standard.
Photographs taken by Lee Moorhouse can also be found in the Daniel E. Warren photographs collection, Org. Lot 391, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
The the University of Oregon Libraries' Special Collections and University Archives holds 7,000 of Lee Moorhouse's original glass plate negatives. Three hundred additional negatives by Moorhouse are located at the National Anthropological Archives at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute, and about 1,400 of his photographs were acquired by the Umatilla County Library in 1958.
This collection consists of 574 photographs, including photographic prints, photographic postcards, and one cyanotype, taken by Major Lee Moorhouse between approximately 1897 and 1919. Many of the photographs are of Native people of the Columbia and Umatilla River basins in Oregon, taken circa 1900-1912, and including members of the Cayuse, Nez Percé, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes. These photographs also include views of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and other unidentified Native settlements in Oregon. There are also some photographs of members of the Yakama tribe, and these images may have been taken by photographer Thomas H. Rutter, who photographed the Yakama until his death in 1906; Moorhouse collected many of Rutter's negatives and sold them as his own. Other photographs in this collection depict landscape views of the areas in which Lee Moorhouse lived and worked with Native people, such as the Columbia River basin, including Celilo Falls; the Umatilla River in Oregon; and the Little Bighorn River valley in Montana. These landscape views were all taken from approximately 1897-1905.
The collection also contains photographs of the Pendleton Round-Up, a rodeo in Pendleton, Oregon, that were taken by Moorhouse between approximately 1909 and 1919. Subjects include various rodeo events, such as bronc riding, bull riding, steer roping, and photographs of the Cowgirl's Bucking Contest, which was discontinued after 1929, as well as Round-Up parades and participants, including Black, Native, and women performers. Additionally, there are two photographs by Moorhouse of other Round-Ups in Crooked River, Oregon, and Toppenish, Washington.
The collection also includes safety film negatives not taken by Moorhouse.
The Oregon Historical Society owns the materials in the Research Library and makes available reproductions for research, publication, and other uses. The Society does not necessarily hold copyright to all materials in the collections. In some cases, permission for use may require seeking additional authorization from copyright owners.
"Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915," by Steven L. Grafe (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).
This series contains photographic portraits, including one cyanotype, of various members of the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes, and photographs of their settlements on the Umatilla Reservation and Columbia River in Oregon, among other places, taken by Lee Moorhouse.
The series is arranged into two subseries: 1.1, Portraits, and 1.2, Settlements.
Arranged alphabetically, where identified, into four groups: Children; Men; Women; and Groups (men, women, and/or children depicted together). Some of the photographs of Yakama men and women in this subseries may have been taken by photographer Thomas H. Rutter before 1906 and sold by Moorhouse as his own.
This subseries contains photographs taken by Lee Moorhouse of various Native settlements in the Columbia River basin and Umatilla County, including the Umatilla Indian Reservation, circa 1904-1905.
This series contains photographs taken by Lee Moorhouse of the Columbia River, including Celilo Falls, and of Umatilla River in Oregon; the Little Bighorn River valley in Montana; and unidentified landscapes, probably in northeastern Oregon, circa 1897-1905.
This series mostly contains photographic postcards taken by Lee Moorhouse of the Pendleton Round-Up in Pendleton, Oregon, from 1901-1919, including views of various rodeo events and Black, Native, and women participants. There are also two photographs of Round-Ups in Crooked River, Oregon, and Toppenish, Washington. Many of the photographs are duplicates or copy images made from original prints in the collection; there are also six film negatives made from photographs in this collection. Arranged into two subseries: 3.1, Pendleton Round-Up, and 3.2, Other Round-Ups.