Ruth Coyote

Ruth Coyote's name is written on at least four glass-plate negatives by Lee Moorhouse, the Pendleton, Oregon businessman who had served as agent for the Umatilla Indian Reservation from 1889 to 1891 and who, between 1888 and 1916, made about nine thousand photographs of life in the Columbia Basin. Unlike many photographers of his period, Moorhouse usually recorded his sitters' names, and his files identify her consistently as Cayuse. One caption reads, in his own words, 'Umatilla Belles. Billy Barnhart's camp on the Umatilla. Lucy Luton and Ruth Coyote, Cayuse tribal women.' The University of Oregon's catalog dates that plate between 1900 and 1910.

The plates show two sides of one life. In a seated portrait she wears a twined cornhusk hat with a V-shaped design, braids tipped in fur wraps, a choker with long strands of beads, and an old-style deer-tail buckskin dress, a cornhusk bag laid across her lap. In two others she stands in a plain wing dress and plaid shawl, hair tied with ribbons, supporting a cradleboard in which an infant is laced beneath beaded floral work — and in one of them she is smiling. The same files hold a plate of a Cayuse baby named Lee Coyote, and portraits of Anna Coyote and Ida Coyote.

Past the photographs, the record thins quickly. The catalogs give no birth or death dates for Ruth Coyote, and this research surfaced no census or agency paper naming her. The treaty of 1855 had settled the Cayuse together with the Umatilla and Walla Walla on the reservation east of Pendleton, and Moorhouse worked in and around that community for nearly three decades. Her negatives are kept in the Moorhouse collection at the University of Oregon, where the catalog descriptions are written in continuing collaboration with Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, the Confederated Tribes' own museum. The name is certain; what she made of the camera looking back at her, the record does not say.