Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosDowntown Pendleton sprawls between the Umatilla River and railroad tracks. Although the city of 17,000 has grown slowly in recent decades, its downtown covers considerably more area than that of Bend’s.
Photos by John Gottberg Anderson / For The Bulleti
Wild & Woolly
The cowboy mystique is alive and well in Pendleton
By John Gottberg Anderson
For
/ The Bulletin
Published: April 05. 2009 4:00AM PST
PENDLETON — Randy Severe was born and raised in this northeastern Oregon community. Growing up with the Pendleton Round-Up, he became a cowboy’s best friend in a cowboy town, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Severe was around horses and rodeo from the time of his earliest memories. His father and uncle, Bill and Duff Severe, were nationally renowned saddle makers. Bill was also a calf roper and steer wrestler, and Randy followed him into the ring, competing as a young man in regional events. Meanwhile, Randy and his brother, Robin, studied the art of saddle making until they could assume the family business, still called Severe Brothers Saddlery.
And Randy is still in the rodeo, albeit in a different role. All three of his daughters were rodeo princesses, two of them queens. After eight years on its board of directors, he’s now the president of the Pendleton Round-Up, considered (with the Calgary Stampede and Cheyenne Frontier Days) one of the three most important rodeos in North America.
In its 99th year, the September roundup is one of two main claims to fame for this city of about 17,000. The other is the Pendleton Woolen Mills, recognized throughout the world for quality blankets and clothing. Less well known is Pendleton’s diverse heritage, a blend of native Umatilla Indians, Oregon Trail pioneers, Chinese miners and rail workers, and a red-light district with stories that would make Aunt Emma blush.
Roundup week
Pendleton’s population hasn’t changed much in recent decades. While Bend has tripled in size since 1990, the largest city in the eastern part of the state has grown by only about 3,000 people.
Those who visit during the third week of September may find that hard to believe: The town somehow finds a place for more than 50,000 rodeo enthusiasts during the annual roundup.
“The economic impact of the roundup on this community is between $22 (million) and $25 million yearly, according to a state study,” Randy Severe said. “We open up the schoolyards for camping, and you can bet that every home with a spare bedroom is going to share it with visitors.”
The history of the Pendleton Round-Up, first held in 1910, is best told at the Round-Up and Happy Canyon Hall of Fame, across Court Avenue from the colorfully painted main stadium. This is the place to go for general roundup information. Exhibits focus not only on rodeo, but on a longtime established Native American pageant staged nightly during the roundup in Happy Canyon, a separate 5,000-seat arena just west of the main stadium.
Displays in the hall of fame honor past roundup champions, many of them the biggest names in the sport, as well as volunteers, queens and princesses, and champion livestock. One of rodeo’s greatest bucking horses, War Paint, who retired in 1964 after mistreating cowboys for 14 years, was stuffed and mounted after his death in 1976 and placed at the entrance to the hall.
But the real action takes place in the 17,000-seat stadium, which, Severe noted, “is one of the only arenas where cowboys compete on grass.” The four-day roundup, scheduled this year for Sept. 16-19, draws about 700 entries and hundreds of animals.
In preparation for its centennial event next year, the Pendleton Round-Up is giving its grounds a face-lift. A stadium seating upgrade is on the docket after the 2009 rodeo. “The stadium has served us well for 100 years,” said Severe. “We’re taking steps to make sure it lasts us for the next 100.”
Urban heritage
Randy’s cousin, Pam Severe, operates the Pendleton Underground Tours. Beginning in a street-level theater and gift shop — but quickly descending to maze-like catacombs beneath a late-19th-century downtown block — the tours retrace seven decades of Pendleton history, from the time of its urban incorporation in 1880 to the formal close of its last brothels in 1953.
“Pendleton once had 32 bars and 18 brothels in its four-block ‘Entertainment District,’” Pam told me. “The last brothel, run by Stella Darby, didn’t actually close until 1967. And I’ve heard stories that she was still operating outside of town until she died in 1977.”
I joined a couple of dozen curious visitors on a 90-minute tour that led through a pre-1900 Chinese laundry, a card room and saloon, a Roaring ’20s-era ice cream parlor, a Prohibition-era speakeasy and applejack still. After a brief visit upstairs to the location of Stella’s Cozy Rooms bordello, we returned to the cellars — part of an estimated three miles of tunnels beneath Pendleton — to see a Chinese bunkhouse and opium den, a meat market and a jail cell.
Artifacts recovered during the preparation of the tunnels, which opened to visitors in 1989, are displayed in a small museum beside the gift shop. Also here is a gallery exhibiting some of the finest saddle work of Duff Severe, who in 1982 won a National Heritage Fellowship, established that same year by the National Endowment for the Arts to acknowledge America’s finest folk arts practitioners. He remains one of only three saddle-makers to have been so honored.
The Pendleton Chamber of Commerce, just a couple of blocks away, has a self-guided walking tour brochure noting 35 points of historical interest. One of them is Hamley & Co. (1901), a renowned Western-wear store at Court Avenue and Main Street; its spacious and elegant adjoining steak house is a must-visit restaurant. Another is the Carnegie Building (1916), now the Pendleton Center for the Arts, where Main Street crosses the Umatilla River.
Heritage Station (the Umatilla County Historical Society Museum) occupies a 1910 railway depot near the chamber offices. Its highlights include a set of Depression-era WPA murals by Albert Runquist and Martina Gangle, and a fine collection of early-20th-century communications devices, including radios and telephones.
The current Umatilla County Courthouse (Court Avenue and Southeast Fourth Street) was new in 1954, but the restored Seth Thomas clock that had hung in the tower of its razed predecessor spent 35 years in storage. A contemporary tower, dedicated in 1989, now houses the century-old clock.
Pendleton woolens
Many people know Pendleton only for the label on fine woolens. Celebrating its centennial this year, the Pendleton Woolen Mills began producing colorful Nez Perce-style blankets in 1909, and soon added Navajo, Hopi and Zuni patterns of the Southwest. The trademark virgin-wool men’s shirt was added in 1924; within five years, the company had a full line of men’s sportswear. The manufacture of women’s wear didn’t begin until 1949.
Today, raw wool is purchased from ranches all over the United States, as well as from South America, Australia and New Zealand. It is scoured, blended and dyed in Washougal, Wash., at a second mill built just east of Vancouver in 1912, before being shipped in 150 colors to Pendleton.
Here it is carded (combed through fine wire), spun and twisted into yarn, steamed and rewound onto 5-pound cones. The colorful yarn is then fed into computer-operated looms, programmed to produce exact patterns. Final finishing, labeling and shipping are performed back in Washougal.
Free tours of the Pendleton factory are offered four times daily (9 and 11 a.m., 1 and 3 p.m.) every weekday, beginning in the retail store. I heartily recommend them to any traveler with even a passing interest in the industrial process.
On the reservation
A half-dozen miles east of Pendleton is the 186,000-acre Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Wildhorse Resort and Casino.
Opened in 1995 and expanded three times since, it boasts a gaming facility with more than 800 slot machines, a concert hall that has hosted performers including Wayne Newton and k.d. lang, a fine-dining restaurant and 24-hour café, a 100-room hotel and adjacent RV park, and one of the best golf courses in Eastern Oregon.
The highlight of a visit to the reservation is a tour of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute and its outstanding museum. Separate from the casino on the far side of the golf course, the $18 million nonprofit facility has been an unassuming part of the tribal landscape since 1998.
Tamástslikt, which means “to interpret” or “to turn around” in the native Sahaptian dialects, honors the heritage of the 2,800 enrolled members of the confederated Umatilla, Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes. The permanent collection describes traditional hunting and gathering, the introduction of horses and traditional Waashat (“Seven Drums”) religious practices. It recalls the influence of white settlers, missionaries and schoolteachers, and it projects a positive future.
Through May — until it is moved to the Museum At Warm Springs for the summer months — Tamástslikt is presenting an impressive exhibit from Willamette University’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art. “The Art of Ceremony: Regalia of Native Oregon” presents the traditional costumes of nine tribes from this state, including the Klamath and the Burns Paiute.
Pageantry and parties
The Umatilla tribes play an important role in the annual Pendleton Round-Up. Many of them set up temporary residence in the Indian Village, an encampment of 300 tepees directly behind the stadium beside the Umatilla River. Large numbers are involved in the Happy Valley Pageant that runs from 7:45 to 9 nightly during the roundup, or participate in dances between events in the stadium.
The main competition — in saddle and bareback bronc riding, calf roping, team roping, steer roping and wrestling (bulldogging), bull riding and barrel racing — begins promptly at 1:15 p.m. Sept. 16-19 and continues until about 4:30 p.m.
Each day has a special flavor. Sept. 16’s Family Day begins with a late-morning Special Olympics program. Sept. 17, when annual Hall of Fame honorees are recognized, is also “Tough Enough to Wear Pink” Day, a benefit for breast cancer research. On Sept. 18, politicians and other celebrities are honored by Pendleton’s “Buckle Club.” Sept. 19 is the rodeo finals; event winners are given their awards after each event rather than at any concluding ceremony.
Meanwhile, there are parades, parties, banquets and musical performances. The Kickoff Parade on Sept. 12 is sponsored by the merchant-dominated Mainstreet Cowboys; country-and-western singer Rodney Atkins will perform that night in the Happy Canyon arena. The semi-formal Hall of Fame banquet is held Sept. 13. The Professional Bull Riders compete Sept. 14 and 15 in Happy Canyon. On Sept. 17, the Westward Ho Parade through downtown Pendleton is a non-motorized march of local history, organized chronologically.
Many party lovers start their days in the Let ’er Buck Room beneath the rodeo’s east grandstands. Open only five days a year (Sept. 15-19) from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., the self-proclaimed “longest bar in Oregon” employs 26 bartenders along its 75-foot length. A popular pour is Pendleton Whiskey, produced and bottled in Hood River under a licensing agreement with the Pendleton Round-Up.
Those who survive the Let ’er Buck crowd may wander down to Main Street, barricaded off for a street party from 4 to midnight Sept. 15-19. Each block features a different band on a rotating schedule. Or they can venture to the convention center, next to Happy Valley and the roundup grounds, for a country-western dance beginning at 9 p.m. The music plays until 1 in the morning, and there’s casino gambling as well.
Back in the saddle
Before leaving Pendleton, I stopped by the Severe Brothers Saddlery to thank Randy Severe for his help and direction. I found him in the only true workshop he’s ever known, the two-story wood building that his late father and uncle built as their saddle shop in 1955.
Severe walked me through the saddle-making process. It begins with a sturdy saddle tree shaped from Douglas fir, he explained, each one fashioned according to size of horse and style of riding. This foundation is covered with rawhide. The various leather pieces of the saddle are cut from generations-old cardboard molds, reassembled and individually tooled. Wool provides padding where needed.
Upstairs from the workshop is a bunkhouse, affectionately dubbed the “Hotel de Cowpunch.” The walls of the bunkhouse are covered with autographed black-and-white photos of the scores of competitors who have unfurled their bedrolls here during the Pendleton Round-Up. Among the photos, I spotted one signed by jazz musician Doc Severinsen, a native of Arlington, a long hour’s drive west of Pendleton. The Severe brothers insisted the former “Tonight Show” band leader spend the night before they’d hang his photo on the wall with those of the cowboys.
Rodeo legend Casey Tibbs, said Severe, gave the Hotel de Cowpunch its tongue-in-cheek moniker when he stayed in the 1950s. “What was so special about Tibbs?” I asked. In true cowboy style, Randy walked back to his bench, picked up a guitar and began singing an Ian Tyson number:
“The wildest young bronc fighter whoever bucked down the line … Just 19 when he won the world back in 1949 … Yeah, Casey, he was different: The great ones always are.”
The Pendleton Round-Up is different, too. The great ones always are.
John Gottberg
Anderson
can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.
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