Hamley · History

Why collectors care

Hamley & Company of Pendleton, Oregon, is a historic saddle and western-goods house whose 1922 Catalog No. 22 printed numbered cowboy-boot styles. Collectors meet those plates on the vintage market and need to read Hamley as a manufacturing and retail house, not as a one-bench Texas bootmaker.

This page is a manufacturing company card. Today’s Pendleton store still carries boots; that is not proof that a modern pair was built on the 1922 last chart.

Company history

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and Archives West agree that brothers J. J. Hamley and Henry Hamley established Hamley & Co. as a leather and saddle shop in 1883. Archives West places early operations in South Dakota and Iowa before a permanent Pendleton storefront in 1905. The company About page adds a Cornwall, England, saddle-trade family story and says the 1905 building is the same storefront used today.

After the Pendleton move the house expanded beyond saddlery into tack, boots, clothing, and other western goods. J. J. Hamley helped organize the first Pendleton Round-Up about 1910 and served as a director. Hamley trophy saddles remain part of that rodeo story. Catalog No. 22 (1922), titled as a cowboy-outfitter catalog, includes boot plates with style numbers 104, 124, 134, 135, 145, and 155 on pages 121–123.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation purchased the Hamley house and properties in August 2019. Company About says Wildhorse Resort & Casino manages day-to-day operations. The living store sells saddles, hats, tack, clothing, and boots. A modern Hamley retail mark is not a 1922 factory stamp.