The early history of Pendleton Woolen Mills is really two histories. First, there is the story of the Bishop family’s involvement in the textile industry. John Bishop’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Kay, emigrated to Oregon in 1863 from England, where he’d worked in mills. As Bishop tells it, Kay “bounced around” the Willamette Valley working in various mills — many of which were profitable but short-lived because they were subject to fire — before finally opening his own, the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill in Salem, in 1889. After he died in 1900, Kay’s daughter Fannie—and her husband C.P. Bishop, who owned a clothing store in Salem — took the reins of the company. Then there is the history of the Pendleton Woolen Mill, which opened in 1896 in the town of the same name, with funding from local financiers. That mill shuttered in 1907 amid a financial panic, but civic leaders campaigned to reopen it. That was partly because they were worried about jobs leaving the area but also because it made sense to weave wool in the area, where so much raw wool was being produced. According to Bobbie Conner, executive director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, there are “far more sheep than cows, more sheep than people,” in Eastern Oregon — as many as 3 million. According to Friedman, the original Pendleton mill started out scouring and cleaning raw wool but, by the end of the 19th century, decided to start making blankets to sell to Native Americans at trading posts. Conner dates the advent of trading posts — and the wool trade blanket — in the Northwest to the early 19th century, when fur traders with the Hudson Bay Company started exploring the interior Northwest. “The trading post represented an important change in technology. One of those changes was a fabric, because we wore buckskin, smoked hides, brain-tanned hides, rawhide in our outerwear, as well,” says Conner, who is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla and whose ancestry is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce. But “there was something very, very important” for tribes in wool trade blankets, she says, because they were durable and colorful. “We have a 200-year relationship with wool.” According to Friedman, in 1890 the U.S. government licensed traders to set up businesses on reservations — “sort of like a convenience store”—to trade food products like sugar and coffee as well as durable goods and tobacco, and Native people would purchase products with whatever they had available to trade. That included blankets, which Indigenous people wore as robes or shawls. During the late 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century, there were numerous American companies that made blankets specifically to be sold at trading posts. But Pendleton was the only one that specifically went into business for that purpose. That continued after the Bishop family took over—and well after most other trade-blanket manufacturers went under in the 1930s. Pendleton CEO John Bishop views photos about the company’s history at its Portland headquarters. 28
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