Jessica Crabtree

Who was Edward Curtis?

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born in 1868 in Wisconsin. His family moved to Minnesota and later the West coast. As a teenager he became an apprentice photographer and eventually opened his own studio in Seattle. He made his first Native American photograph in 1895 – a portrait of Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle. Around the turn of the century he and his camera accompanied several research expeditions on local tribal lands and through the Plains, Southwest, and Alaska. This launched his life-long interest in documenting Native American heritage.

In 1906 J.P.Morgan commissioned Curtis to produce a 20-volume photographic series on the Native Americans of the West. The series, entitled The North American Indian, was to contain 1,500 original photographic prints, and was slated for completion in 5 years. The first volume was published the following year, with a preface by President Theodore Roosevelt – but it was to be another 25 years before the project finally saw completion.

Curtis traveled extensively throughout the country west of the Mississippi River, taking over 40,000 photographs of Native Americans, documenting biographies, cultural practices, and traditional narratives, and even making recordings of speech and songs in Native languages.

Unfortunately, Curtis lost his studio and much of his original work in a nasty divorce settlement that was drawn out for years. He ultimately sold the rights to the entire project to J.P.Morgan’s son. The final volume of The North American Indian was published in 1930, but the majority of Curtis’s work landed in obscurity and changed hands several times over the next 50 years, with much of it being lost or destroyed. Curtis died in 1952 at the age of 84.

Next: The Curtis Collection