Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian

Today, The North American Indian masterwork mainly resides in institutions, libraries, and the private collections of the wealthy. Only a few hundred sets were actually printed, and complete sets at auction are rare. In 2005 a complete set sold for $1.4 million, and two years later, a less-than-complete set was hammered down just under the million mark. Lois Flury, of Flury and Company in Seattle, made a private sale of a full set for $1.8 million. Bruce Kapson, of Bruce Kapson Gallery in California, currently has on his website one volume with a price tag of $14,500. Christopher Cardozo, of Christopher Cardozo Fine Art, features “Zuni Governor” on his website for $21,450. Depending on the volume, condition, and type of paper, Flury estimated a single volume from the set can run anywhere between $12,000 and $50,000 with folios ranging from $25,000 to $150,000. 

Curtis himself never saw any one of those substantial sums for his lifelong efforts. In fact, he died in relative obscurity with little to call his own. The New York Times ran a small obituary upon his death on October 19, 1952. It was less than one hundred words long and noted—as a brief aside—“Mr. Curtis was also known as a photographer.”

According to Lois Flury, who has studied and collected Curtis since the 1970s, “He was a man of tremendous talent and vision. He refused to give up. He never quit. He knew there would be challenges but it wasn’t in his vocabulary to say, ‘I failed.’” 

He didn’t, what with his visits to eighty tribes, his forty thousand negatives, his countless interviews on manners and customs, his tribal histories, his recording of legends, myths and stories, his linguistic studies, his wax cylinder recordings of music, songs, and chants, the basic concepts of seventy-five different languages recorded, and over ten thousand songs recorded. He was the first person to make motion pictures of Native Americans. With his assistants in tow, he tried to record everything. “Curtis brought a real love and respect towards, and curiosity about, Native cultures,” noted Anne Makepeace, author of Edward S. Curtis, Coming to Light and director of the documentary on Curtis, Coming to Light. “He didn’t want to just capture their images … he wanted to enter their lives.” 

Curtis was born to a Civil War veteran and his wife in 1868 in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Having dropped out of school in the sixth grade in Minnesota, he was a mostly self-taught man. He made his first camera and was immediately smitten with it. So much so that by the age of seventeen, he was a photographer’s apprentice in St. Paul.

In 1887 the family moved west. For $150, Curtis, now in the bustling frontier town of Seattle, opened a photography shop of his own with Rasmus Rothi. Several months later he broke free from that and created another studio with Thomas Guptill. Curtis and Guptill Photographers and Photoengravers was a successful business. Wealthy Seattleites appreciated Curtis’ talent for portraits. He started to make a name for himself with his gold and silver photo processing called “Curt-tone.” He owned the photography studio outright by 1897, marrying Clara Phillips and beginning a family in the meantime.

His star rising, Curtis headed to nearby Mount Rainier one fateful day in 1898. He happened upon a lost climbing party. He guided them on the mountain himself and made fast friends with members of the party that included Clinton Hart Merriam, head of the U.S. Biological Survey, and George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream magazine. Soon, Curtis was invited to join them as official photographer of an expedition to Alaska sponsored by railroad magnate Edward Harriman. Curtis gladly accepted.

On that journey Curtis became acquainted with naturalist John Muir and writer John Burroughs. It was also during this expedition that Grinnell, an expert on the Plains Indians, showed Curtis that the Indians were a vanishing race, one that should be preserved in some form or other. The seed was planted. Curtis publicly vowed to create a complete record of the North American Indian. It would take him, he reckoned, five years.

Meanwhile, as Curtis’ interest in Indians grew, he entered a “Prettiest Children in America” photo contest conducted by Ladies Home Journal. He submitted a shot of Marie Fischer that caught the eye of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt invited Curtis to New York to take pictures of the Roosevelt family. 

Roosevelt heard then of Curtis’ project and gave him his full support. (In fact, Roosevelt would later write the foreword for the first volume.) Emboldened now by his growing national reputation, his friendships with leaders, writers, and men of wealth and circumstance, Curtis took whatever opportunity he could to stoke his success. He exhibited nationally. He lectured. But he needed money. The project would not be cheap; it required a benefactor. Curtis had the temerity to approach J. P. Morgan himself.

Morgan said no. The tycoon dismissed the photographer straight away at a meeting in Morgan’s lavish office. Crestfallen, and not having anything to lose, Curtis opened his portfolio for Morgan anyway. It was then that Morgan gazed upon the face of Mosa, a Mohave Indian child. Morgan’s assistant later claimed that it was only the third time that Morgan had ever changed his mind about anything. He agreed to give Curtis $15,000 a year ($75,000 in total) to create a twenty-volume set of ethnographic text with the highest quality photoengravings. And so the project began. The rest of Curtis’ life would be consumed by it.

He hoped to get five hundred subscribers to further subsidize the project. A deluxe edition (known now as “tissue sets”) would sell for $3,500 (a princely sum back then). The standard editions (either in Holland Van Gelder paper or on Japanese vellum) would sell for $3,000. He never got nearly that many subscriptions. Of the five hundred numbered sets that were planned, it remains unknown how many were actually printed. Only 272 copies were sold by subscription. That did not stop Curtis.

Forever a marketer, Curtis wrote for Scribner’s magazine about the Indians and continued to lecture as well. He made a movie, In the Land of the Head Hunters, and developed a “picture-musicale.” He placed his photos in other writers’ books. He did most anything to showcase who he was and what he was doing. The first volume, published in 1907, focused on the Apache, Jicarillas, and the Navajo. Roosevelt wrote in the foreword, “In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful.”

His work continued. Volumes two and three were published in 1907. Volumes four and five came two years later. Volumes six, seven, and eight appeared in 1911. Volumes nine, ten, and eleven followed in 1913, 1915, and 1916, respectively. And then, on April 2, 1917, America entered World War I, and production of The North American Indian ground to a six-year halt.

The war, the sinking of the Lusitania, his financial failures on his musicales and movies, and his benefactor’s death—Morgan died in 1913—made it impossible for Curtis to continue his field work properly. Though Morgan’s son continued to finance the project, Curtis couldn’t find enough subscribers to continue in any meaningful way.

His wife filed for divorce in October 1916. Though not final until 1919, Curtis lost to his wife his studio and all his original camera negatives. Rather than have Clara take them from him, he and his daughter Beth destroyed them.

With his health failing, Curtis moved to Hollywood with his daughter in 1922. He opened a new photo studio. Desperate for money to continue documenting the Indians, he took still photos at movie studios. He took pictures of Tarzan. In 1923, though not credited, he was an assistant cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille’s epic silent film, The Ten Commandments.

With some money in hand, work commenced. Volume twelve came out in 1922, followed by thirteen and fourteen in 1924. Fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen were published in 1926, with volume eighteen coming two years later. Support, however, was virtually non-existent. The American public was no longer interested in Curtis’ ethnographic viewpoints. The whole project had dragged on too long; it was supposed to have been completed by 1912. It was 1930 when volume nineteen and the last volume (The American Eskimo) were finally completed. The New York Herald called it, “The most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible.”

Instead of feeling triumphant, Curtis was physically and mentally exhausted, and he had little to show for his long and arduous efforts. His family was fractured. His finances were drained. The public interest in Indians was gone. His benefactors and friends were dead. In 1935, the Morgan estate sold the rights and remaining unpublished materials to Charles Lauriat, a rare-book dealer in Boston. Lauriat acquired nineteen complete sets and fifty additional sets using remainder materials and photogravures printed on different paper. What the company couldn’t sell was put in storage. There it sat, forgotten, for about thirty years.

Lauriet’s stored materials were rediscovered in the 1970s, as interest in Curtis’ photography increased. Curtis, however, was long dead. He had suffered a fatal heart attack in 1952 and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. His simple marker reads, “Edward S. Curtis. Beloved Father.” 

By the 1970s most all of Curtis’ sets were residing in libraries and museums—J. P. Morgan’s personal set rests comfortably at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. With many of the negatives destroyed, Curtis’ work became scarce and collectible. “It was,” said Makepeace, “the most comprehensive and most gorgeous documentation of Native American life that has ever been made.” 

Now, people like Flury, Kapson, and Cardozo continue to showcase Curtis’ artistic genius and sell what remains of his works. They do it because they love his work, and so people like Raven Blanket won’t be forgotten. Nor Dusty Dress. Nor New Chest and Lone Flag, Bear’s Teeth and Red Star, Captain Charlie, and Crow Ghost. As Curtis said, “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered for the benefits of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or else the opportunity will be lost for all time."