Lee Moorhouse - Photographs.

Lee Moorhouse (1850–1926) was an American photographer, businessman, surveyor, civic official and former Oregon militia officer whose photographs provide an extensive record of eastern Oregon and the Columbia River Plateau around the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Marion County, Iowa, he travelled west with his family in 1861 and later settled in Pendleton, Oregon. He worked in mining, surveying, ranching, real estate and insurance and served as an agent on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Photography developed from an amateur pursuit into a substantial documentary practice, and between 1888 and 1916 he produced more than 9,000 negatives recording Pendleton, the Umatilla Reservation and surrounding communities. His subjects included agriculture, wheat farming, businesses, schools, churches, railways, automobiles, houses, parades, circuses and the Pendleton Round Up, creating a broad record of economic and social life in the region.

Moorhouse is particularly associated with his photographs of Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Nez Perce, Yakama and other Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. He made portraits both outdoors and in constructed settings, frequently using clothing, baskets, weapons and other objects from his own collection as photographic props. Some subjects were therefore photographed with objects or clothing that did not necessarily represent their own tribal or personal identity, an important distinction when interpreting the images as historical evidence. Alongside these staged portraits, Moorhouse photographed families, dwellings, camps, ceremonies, reservation landscapes and individuals in everyday settings. Attribution within the wider Moorhouse archive also requires care because he acquired negatives made by other photographers, particularly Thomas H. Rutter, and subsequently distributed some of those photographs under his own name.

Moorhouse circulated his photographs through prints and postcards and published Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs in 1905, followed by a second edition in 1906. The album reproduced portraits and other photographs relating principally to Indigenous communities of the north western United States. His work was later examined extensively in Steven L. Grafe's Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898–1915 (2006), which places the photographs within the history of the Umatilla Reservation and Columbia Plateau communities. Approximately 7,000 Moorhouse images are preserved by the University of Oregon Libraries, with additional holdings at the Oregon Historical Society and other institutions, making the surviving archive a substantial photographic record of eastern Oregon and Indigenous communities during a period of major political, economic and cultural change.

Moorhouse served in the Oregon State Militia, where he attained the rank of major. He subsequently continued to use the title professionally and socially, and contemporary publications frequently identify him as Major Lee Moorhouse or Maj. Lee Moorhouse. This is why the 1905 Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs carries the credit “Major Lee Moorhouse, Pendleton, Oregon.”

Lee Moorhouse

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Photographs by Major Lee Moorhouse (1850–1926).
Original collections include the University of Oregon Libraries and other archival institutions.
Licence: Public Domain.

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