Pendleton Blankets: Which to Buy for Ranch, Camp, and Bedroll

The Pendleton National Park blanket is the full-size bed blanket: 100 percent virgin wool, napped for a thicker hand, made in the USA of fabric woven in Pendleton’s own mills, and dry clean only. The Yakima Camp Throw is for field use: 54 by 66 inches, a wool-cotton blend that packs smaller. If you can only buy one, the National Park blanket does both jobs well enough, at the cost of being more precious about where it ends up.

They look related because they are. Both come from the Pacific Northwest mills the Bishop family has run since 1909. What differs is the fiber, the size, and where each one belongs.

Where Pendleton comes from

The family’s weaving goes back to Thomas Kay, an English master weaver who arrived in Oregon in 1863. His daughter Fannie married the retailer C.P. Bishop in 1876, their three sons trained at the Philadelphia Textile School, and in 1909, with local backing, the Bishops rebuilt a woolen mill in Pendleton, Oregon. They added a second mill at Washougal, Washington, in 1912.

The first National Park blanket came in 1916, the Glacier National Park blanket. James J. Hill, whose Great Northern Railway served the south end of Glacier, asked Pendleton for a blanket to sell at his park stores that caught the spirit of the old fur-trade blankets. Pendleton answered with four bars of black, yellow, green and red at each end, a design Pendleton still sells.

National Park blankets are still woven in Pendleton’s Pacific Northwest mills, and the label on them says Made in USA.

A person wrapped in a wool blanket sitting by a campfire in an outdoor setting, the classic working context for a heavyweight wool camp blanket. — The working context for a wool blanket: a fire, an open camp, temperatures dropping after sunset. The blanket as a camp tool, not a decorative item. *Photo via Pexels. Pexels License.*

The National Park blanket: the flagship

The National Park blanket is 100 percent virgin wool, napped so the fabric is combed up softer and thicker. Pendleton sells it in twin (66 by 90 inches, about 4.3 pounds), full (80 by 90), queen (90 by 90, about 5.9 pounds) and king (108 by 90, about 7.8 pounds). The care label says dry clean.

That care label is the practical catch. Wool felts and shrinks in hot water and hard agitation, which is why Pendleton sends it to the dry cleaner rather than the washing machine. In daily use, brush or shake it out, air it in the sun, and spot-clean spills with cold water before they set.

It works as the primary blanket on a bed, a lap blanket on a covered porch in November, or an extra layer in a wall tent. It is not an inexpensive blanket, and the dry-clean label means it does better at the ranch house than in the bottom of a pannier.

Close-up of the woven Hudson's Bay Company label on a cream wool point blanket. — The label on a Hudson's Bay Company point blanket. Both Pendleton and HBC trace their striped designs to the same fur-trade textile heritage, and Pendleton's early park blankets borrowed HBC-style points. *Photo: Me4u2me via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.*

The Yakima Camp Throw: the working blanket

The Yakima Camp Throw measures 54 by 66 inches and uses a wool-cotton blend rather than pure wool. The smaller size packs down better in a saddlebag or canvas duffle. The Yakima Camp blankets in the same line are virgin wool and cotton, made in the USA, and dry clean.

The trade-off: a smaller, sturdier footprint for camp, with cleanup that still means a dry cleaner.

Where it belongs: horse trailer bunk, sleeping bag liner, camp chair blanket on a cold evening, trail-riding lap throw. It is made to be used in the places where blankets get the most wear. The dry-clean requirement means you bring it home dirty at the end of a trip and deal with it later, which is not a real constraint for most use cases.

How to read a Pendleton label

Genuine Pendleton blankets are labeled with pattern name, fiber content, country of manufacture, and care instructions. On the National Park and Yakima Camp blankets the product pages say “Made in USA” of fabric woven in Pendleton’s American mills. Not everything in the Pendleton catalog can say that, so read the label on the specific piece.

The HBC comparison

Anyone who researches Pendleton blankets will encounter Hudson’s Bay Company point blankets as the natural comparison, and the comparison is correct because both share a common origin in the Western trade blanket tradition.

Points are the short lines woven or sewn into the edge of a trade blanket, and they indicate the blanket’s size. French weavers used them from the 1690s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company adopted them around 1780. Pendleton used points only on its early National Park blankets, from 1916 to about 1937: the first Glacier Park blanket came in 3 1/2, 4 and 5-point sizes.

Today the HBC blankets are sold as Hudson’s Bay Stripes through Canadian Tire. The difference for Wyoming buyers is mostly cultural: Pendleton’s design vocabulary (geometric tribal patterns, National Park imagery, Western motifs) maps directly to the regional visual culture in a way that the HBC stripe pattern does not. For ranch and outfitter camp use, Pendleton is the more locally resonant choice.