Pendleton’s Blankets Still Good as Gold Among American Indians

After nearly a century, Pendleton Indian blankets are woven into the culture of every American tribe.

Prized for their vibrant colors and distinctive patterns, these woolens are traditionally presented at tribal christenings, form the core of a young girl’s dowry and are used as burial shrouds.

Pendleton Woolen Mills is the only domestic manufacturer that still caters to the Indian trade. In a sense, it’s a license to print money: The blankets are used to negotiate tribal business deals and are readily accepted as loan collateral.

“Pendleton blankets have always been collectible because the Indians understood them as a form of currency they trusted and understood,” says Jim Collins of Aspen, Colo., a private dealer and Indian textile expert.

Collins says prices among antique dealers and collectors have tripled in the last five years. The best vintage blankets, which originally sold for under $10, now fetch $800 to $1,000 wholesale.

When the first colonists arrived on the Eastern Seaboard, they found blankets an essential of Indian life, serving both as shelter and clothing.

Even then, blankets were a medium of exchange. Quaker leader William Penn used blankets in bartering with the Delaware Indians for the real estate now known as Pennsylvania.

The Indians stopped making their own blankets around 1875. Collins has his own theory as to why.

The Navajos were acknowledged as the best blanket weavers in North America. They were also fierce fighters against the U.S. Cavalry’s efforts to conquer the Southwest frontier.

Repeated battles failed to subdue them, so in 1863 an Army unit led by Kit Carson burned and pillaged the Navajos’ land. The impoverished tribe surrendered, and survivors spent five years in an internment camp.

When they were released they were issued blankets like they had never seen: machine-woven, olive-drab Army blankets.

It was more than a decade before the tribe got back on its feet. By then, according to Collins’ theory, they had lost their blanket customers to commercial manufacturers.

In 1893, two Boston wool brokers built a mill at Pendleton in northeastern Oregon. They were trying to cut rail costs by cleaning wool before it was shipped from western sheep country to eastern mills.

Since lanolin and dirt account for more than 60% of the weight of newly sheared fleece, they stood to save plenty. But tariffs for clean wool skyrocketed shortly after the mill opened, so in 1895 they turned it into a blanket-weaving operation.

In 1909, the mill was sold to the C. P. Bishop family of Salem, whose descendants remain its sole owners. The family hired Englishman Joe Rounsley as head textile designer. His fascination with tribal art inspired the Pendleton Indian blankets of today.

When he arrived in the West, Rounsley was quick to establish a rapport with the Indians. He immersed himself in their culture, living at various times with the Navajos, Hopis and Apaches.

His blankets never copied an Indian pattern, but they adapted tribal symbols. They also appealed to the Indians’ love of color. Rounsley also was sensitive to Indian spiritual traditions. His patterns extended beyond the selvage edges, for example, because Indians believed a design contained within a blanket’s borders would trap its owner’s spirit.

Tribes grew to treasure Pendleton blankets, tourists took them home as souvenirs of the West, and before long the blankets’ appeal had spread to the general public.

The current product line includes 15 patterns and 200 color combinations, most of which retail for $125 to $135. They are marketed to the tribes through a distributor in Arizona, who sells to Indian trading posts and retailers in tribal areas.

Bill Nance, manager of Pendleton’s blanket and piece goods division, confers with the tribes in developing new patterns. Last spring he traveled to South Dakota to develop a new blanket requested by the Sioux.

Pendleton is proud of its roots in the Indian trade, but the attachment is more than sentimental. Although he declined to discuss profits, Nance said, “It’s not just a hobby.”