Mrs William Tobias

This painting's title repeats, word for word, the way its source photograph was labeled: “Mrs. William Tobias.” The note that traveled with the image records a portrait made about 1900, attributes it to Lee Moorhouse of Pendleton, Oregon, and identifies the sitter as a woman of the Yakama Nation. A search of the major public Moorhouse repositories did not surface a print under this caption, so her identification rests on that note rather than on a located archival record. This entry says so plainly, because she deserves accuracy as much as admiration.

What can be said with certainty is what the caption itself shows: around 1900, a Native woman's photograph could enter the record carrying only her husband's name. Agency rolls, church registers, and studio ledgers of the day routinely wrote married Native women down as “Mrs.” followed by an English man's name — a convention that preserved the household while letting the woman's own name, in her own language and in English alike, fall away. She is not the only woman in this gallery whose caption remembers someone else first; she is the one whose caption remembers almost nothing else at all.

If the note is right, she was Yakama — one of the Plateau peoples of south-central Washington, bands confederated by the treaty of 1855, whose reservation lands in the Yakima Valley were under heavy allotment and leasing pressure at the turn of the century, precisely when the photograph was made. Moorhouse's nine-thousand-image archive includes Yakama sitters among its Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla neighbors, so the attribution is plausible even though unproven. The portrait is offered in that spirit: a particular face, honestly labeled with what is known — and with what was never written down.