Pendleton: Wool, Rodeo, and the Umatilla Homeland

The city spread across the Umatilla River valley here is named for a man who never visited. George Pendleton was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate of eighteen sixty-four, and his name was attached to the new town when it was incorporated in October of eighteen eighty. But the land itself goes back far longer than any name on a ballot.

The Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples had lived across this plateau for thousands of years. In May of eighteen fifty-five, their representatives met with federal officials at a council in Walla Walla and signed a treaty that established the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation on eight hundred square miles immediately southeast of where Pendleton now stands. The tribes ceded enormous territories but retained rights to fish, hunt, and gather at their usual and accustomed places. Pendleton grew up directly adjacent to that reservation, and the relationship between the city and the Confederated Tribes has defined the place ever since.

The first commercial post in the area dates to eighteen fifty-one, when a trader named William McKay established a station at the confluence of McKay Creek and the Umatilla River. The town that organized around it became a supply point for the wheat farms of the Columbia Plateau and the ranches running cattle through the Blue Mountains.

In nineteen oh nine, a family named Bishop acquired and revitalized an existing fabric mill and opened Pendleton Woolen Mills, focused from the start on producing blankets and robes designed for Native American communities. Those blankets, in bold geometric patterns developed in dialogue with tribal weavers, became famous far beyond their original market and are now collected worldwide.

The following year, in September of nineteen ten, the city held its first Pendleton Round-Up, a rodeo and frontier celebration that drew seven thousand people on its opening day. The Round-Up has run every September since, and the Confederated Tribes participate prominently, setting up a village of more than three hundred teepees and hosting their own encampment and cultural programs alongside the rodeo grounds. The slogan Let'er Buck has been the Round-Up's battle cry for more than a century.