Major Lee Moorhouse of Pendleton, Oregon was an Indian Agent for the Umatilla Indian Reservation and a photographer. From 1888 to 1916 he produced over 9,000 images which document urban, rural, and Native American life in the Columbia Basin, and particularly Umatilla County, Oregon. So extensive and revealing are Moorhouse's images that his collection is one of the preeminent social history collections for Oregon. Special Collections & University Archives of the University of Oregon Libraries has a collection of 7000 images by Major Moorhouse.

Picturing the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Tribes is a collaborative project among the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute (TCI) of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the University of Oregon (UO) Libraries, and Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). Partial funding has been provided by the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC).

The project’s intent is twofold: first, to make the Major Lee Moorhouse photographs of native peoples available to a wide audience; and second, to provide a site for historical descriptions of these images as well as descriptions created by native peoples.

Although Major Lee Moorhouse was a well-known photographer during his own age, for the last seventy years his pictures and their inscriptions have been almost forgotten by scholars and the general public. However, native peoples, who are often the subjects of his photographs, have had a tradition of using these images, when they were available, and of developing narratives for them. These narratives have never been systematically collected or written down. This present project aims to make these images and their descriptions available.

We here present about two hundred and fifty of Major Lee Moorhouse’s pictures of the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla tribes for tribal and non-tribal members. These are about ten percent of Moorhouse’s pictures of native peoples. It is the hope of the project team that more images and narratives will be made available in the coming years.