Edward S. Curtis: The Photographer Who Gave Up Everything to Document Native America
When Edward S. Curtis died in Los Angeles in October 1952, the New York Times gave him six sentences. The last one read: "Mr. Curtis was also widely known as a photographer." Which is a bit like saying Brunel dabbled in bridges.
Curtis had spent three decades hauling a huge glass-plate camera across the American West and up into the Arctic. He took more than 40,000 pictures, recorded over 10,000 wax cylinders of songs and speech and produced a 20-volume work that one New York paper ranked as the most ambitious thing in publishing since the King James Bible. He also lost his wife, his studio, his copyright and his health along the way. He never made a penny from any of it.
His photographs are now among the best known images of Native American people ever made. They're also among the most argued over, because Curtis wasn't above tidying up reality when it didn't suit the picture.
Quick Answers
Who was Edward S. Curtis? An American photographer (1868 to 1952) best known for The North American Indian, a 20-volume record of more than 80 Native nations published between 1907 and 1930.
Who paid for it? The banker J.P. Morgan put up $75,000 in 1906. None of it was salary, so Curtis worked unpaid.
Were his photos staged? Often, yes. He handed out wigs and costumes, asked people to re-enact ceremonies and had modern objects retouched out of his negatives.
Did he get rich? No. He signed his copyright over to the Morgan family, who sold the whole project to a Boston bookseller for $1,000 in 1935.
What's a set worth now? One sold at auction for just under $2.9 million in 2012.
A Preacher's Son Who Mortgaged the Farm
Edward Sherriff Curtis was born near Whitewater, Wisconsin, on 19th February 1868. Two small things there that most biographies get wrong. The Curtis Legacy Foundation, run by his descendants, says the 16th February date you'll see all over the internet started life as a typo. His middle name also has two Rs, after his grandparents Charles and Elizabeth Sherriff.
His father Johnson was a travelling preacher with poor health and not much money. The family moved to Minnesota when Edward was small, and a short apprenticeship at a studio in St. Paul was the only photography training he ever had. In 1887 father and son headed west to Washington Territory to find a homestead. The rest of the family followed in the spring of 1888, and Johnson died three days after they arrived.
That left Edward, aged 20, as the breadwinner. He then wrecked his back working in a lumberyard and spent most of a year in bed, nursed by a neighbour called Clara Phillips. In 1891 he mortgaged the family homestead to buy a share in a Seattle photography studio. He married Clara the following year. Within a few years the Curtis Studio was where Seattle's well-off went to have their portraits taken.
A Dollar a Pose
The picture that changed things was taken in 1895. Its subject was an elderly woman known around Seattle as Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish and Suquamish leader the city was named after. She lived in a shack on the waterfront and dug clams for a living. Curtis paid her a dollar for each pose and noted that she "preferred to spend her time having pictures made than in digging clams".
His photographs of Angeline and other local Native people won national prizes. Then came a stroke of luck. In 1898, while photographing on Mount Rainier, Curtis ran into a party of scientists who'd got themselves lost. One of them was George Bird Grinnell, an anthropologist and an authority on the Plains nations. Grinnell got him a job as official photographer on the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska, alongside the naturalist John Muir. A year later he took Curtis to Montana to watch the Piegan Blackfeet hold a Sun Dance.
That was that. Curtis came home with the idea of photographing every Native nation west of the Mississippi that still kept something of its traditional life. He shot them in the soft, moody, gold-toned style that was fashionable among art photographers at the time, the same pictorialist approach later taken up by Californian photographers like Arthur Kales.
Roosevelt, Morgan and a Deal With No Wages
Curtis was good at meeting the right people. A spread in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1904 got him invited to photograph President Theodore Roosevelt's sons. He became a friend of the family, and in 1906 he was the photographer at the White House wedding of the president's famously unruly daughter, Alice Roosevelt. Roosevelt went on to write the foreword to the first volume.
It was also in 1906 that Curtis went to see J.P. Morgan, the richest banker in America. Morgan turned him down flat. Then he looked through the prints Curtis had brought with him and changed his mind. He agreed to pay $75,000 over five years in return for 25 sets of the finished books and 500 original prints.
The catch was a big one. The money covered fieldwork only. Morgan paid no salary, and the printing costs had to be met by selling subscriptions. A standard set cost $3,000 and a deluxe one $3,750, a small fortune in 1907. Curtis planned an edition of 500. In the end only 272 sets were ever sold.
By the time Morgan's five years ran out, Curtis had finished eight volumes out of 20. Morgan died in 1913. His son kept the project alive, but with much smaller sums.
The Work Itself
Curtis used a 14 by 17 inch view camera and glass-plate negatives, which meant lugging crates of breakable glass by wagon, mule and canoe. He didn't do it alone. A former journalist called William Myers did a huge share of the research and writing, and the ethnologist Frederick Webb Hodge edited the text. They wrote down languages, kinship systems, foods, games and stories, and recorded songs on wax cylinders.
The people who sat for him included Geronimo, Red Cloud and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Some communities are said to have called him the Shadow Catcher. The finished work ran to 20 volumes of text and 20 portfolios, with 2,234 photogravure plates and nearly 5,000 pages. Smithsonian Magazine has estimated it would cost more than $35 million to produce today.
The Custer Story Roosevelt Told Him to Drop
Here's a part of the Curtis story that rarely makes the short biographies. In June 1907 he rode over the Little Bighorn battlefield with three Crow men who had scouted for Custer's 7th Cavalry in 1876: White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead and Hairy Moccasin.
What they told him didn't match the heroic version. On their account, Custer sat on a ridge for the best part of an hour watching Major Reno's men get cut to pieces, and didn't go to help. Curtis concluded that Custer had abandoned Reno, not the other way round, and thought about asking the president to order an official inquiry.
Roosevelt, a big admirer of Custer, wasn't having it. In Curtis's own words to an army general in 1908, the president's advice was to leave the row to somebody else and "cling closely to my Indians". Curtis did as he was told and cut the episode from his Sioux volume. His notes sat with the family until his son Harold gave them to the Smithsonian, and they weren't published until 2000. Historians of the battle weren't bowled over when they finally appeared, mind. Curtis's reading is one interpretation, not a settled fact.
Were Edward Curtis's Photos Staged?
To understand the criticism of Curtis, you need to know what was going on around him. While he was working, US government policy was to stamp out Native languages, religion and dress, most brutally through the boarding school system built to "kill the Indian" in Native children. Curtis, like most white Americans of his day, assumed Native people were a "vanishing race". He wanted to photograph what he thought was about to disappear.
The trouble is that the people in front of his camera were living in the 20th century. So he rewound them. He carried wigs and clothing, asked people to re-enact battles and ceremonies and cropped or retouched anything modern. The best known example is In a Piegan Lodge from 1910, which shows two men, Little Plume and Yellow Kidney, sitting in a tipi. In the original negative there's a clock on the ground between them. In the published version it's gone.
Curtis didn't hide the thinking behind this. In 1912 he wrote to one of his backers that "pictures should be made to illustrate the period before the white man came".
The other long-running complaint is about names. Curtis identified only about a third of his sitters, and gave many pictures romantic titles in place of a name. Barbara Brotherton, a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, has summed up the result bluntly: "But he cast Native people forever in the past."
That isn't the whole picture though. Lydia Sigo, an archivist at the Suquamish Museum, has pointed out that the sitters weren't passive. Ceremonies were banned, children were being taken away and many people chose to work with Curtis because they understood he was making a record. For a lot of families today, a Curtis print is the only photograph of a great-grandparent that exists. He wasn't the only one at it either. Karl Moon was photographing Pueblo people in a very similar spirit at the same time.
The Film That Beat Nanook and Flopped
In 1914 Curtis tried to dig himself out of debt with a feature film. In the Land of the Head Hunters was a melodrama of love, sorcery and war, shot on the coast of British Columbia with an all Kwakwaka'wakw cast. It came out eight years before Nanook of the North, the film usually credited as the first documentary.
His fixer and assistant director was George Hunt, a local man who'd already spent years working with anthropologists. The cast wore wigs because they'd long since cut their hair, and craftsmen were paid to build masks, canoes and a village set. There's an odd twist here. Canada had banned the potlatch and its ceremonies, so performing for Curtis's camera was one of the few legal ways to dance them at all.
Critics liked it. Audiences, expecting tipis and horses, were baffled. It reportedly cost $20,000 and took $3,269. Curtis later sold his print to the American Museum of Natural History for $1,500. The film was restored in 2008 with its original orchestral score, and the cast's descendants have been warm about it. As William Cranmer, a hereditary chief and chairman of the U'mista Cultural Society, put it: "If Mr. Curtis hadn't made that film, we wouldn't see it."
Divorce, Arrest and Collapse
Curtis was away from home for most of every year, and the money all went on the project. Clara filed for divorce in 1916 and it was finalised in 1919. She got the house and the Seattle studio. Before the settlement went through, Curtis and his daughter Beth copied some of his glass negatives and destroyed the originals, apparently so Clara wouldn't end up owning them.
He moved to Los Angeles with Beth and paid the bills as a stills photographer and cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille, working on The Ten Commandments. In 1927, aged 59 and with a bad hip, he made his last field trip, to the Bering Sea. On the way back to Nome, an ice storm nearly sank the boat and the newspapers reported him lost at sea. When he got back to Seattle that October, sheriff's deputies were waiting. Clara had him arrested for unpaid alimony. In court he broke down and told the judge the work was the only thing he could do that was worth doing.
The final volume came out in 1930, in the teeth of the Depression, and hardly anyone noticed. Curtis then fell apart, physically and mentally, and spent the best part of two years recovering in Denver.
Sold for $1,000
By then he didn't even own his pictures. He'd signed the copyright over to the Morgan family in 1928 to keep the fieldwork going. In 1935 they sold everything to the Boston rare book dealer Charles Lauriat: the copyright, the negatives, 19 unsold sets and thousands of prints. The price was $1,000 plus a share of future royalties.
Curtis worked on DeMille's 1936 western The Plainsman, then spent years prospecting for gold with his son Harold without finding any and planning a book called The Lure of Gold that he never finished. From 1948 he wrote long letters about the old days to a retired Seattle librarian, Harriet Leitch, who had tracked him down. In the last of them, his eyesight going and his hands stiff with arthritis, he described his Los Angeles flat as "the most discouraging place I have ever tried to live in". He died of a heart attack at Beth's home on 19th October 1952, aged 84.
What Is an Edward Curtis Print Worth Today?
And there the story might have ended. Lauriat's shop sold what it could and shoved the rest in the cellar. In 1972 a photographer named Karl Kernberger went looking and found the lot still down there: the copper printing plates, bound sets, loose pages and prints by the thousand.
The timing was perfect. Interest in Native American history was surging, and within a couple of years Curtis had gone from forgotten to famous. One set of The North American Indian fetched just under $2.9 million at auction in 2012. Museums have changed how they show him too. When the Seattle Art Museum marked his 150th birthday in 2018, it hung his prints alongside work by Native artists including the Diné photographer Will Wilson, whose tintype portraits of living Native people answer Curtis directly.
That's probably the fairest way to look at him. Curtis believed he was photographing the end of something. He was wrong about that, and the people who prove it are the descendants of his sitters, who are still here and still looking at his pictures.
FAQ
How can you tell an original Curtis photogravure from a later reprint?
Start with the small print under the image. Plates from the original run carry a credit line reading "From Copyright Photograph" with a year and Curtis's name, followed by the printer. That's John Andrew & Son of Boston on the earlier volumes and Suffolk Engraving Co of Cambridge, Massachusetts on the later ones. They come in two sizes. The small plates bound into the text volumes have an image of roughly 5 by 7 inches, and the big portfolio plates are about 11.5 by 15.5 inches. Three papers were used: Japanese vellum, a Dutch paper called Van Gelder and a thin Japanese tissue, which is the rarest.
Then there are the restrikes. After the copper plates turned up in Boston, new prints were pulled from them from the late 1970s onwards. These are real photogravures made from Curtis's own plates, so they aren't fakes, but they aren't vintage and they sell for a lot less. If you've inherited a print and can't tell which you've got, a photography specialist at an auction house is the person to ask.
Are Edward Curtis's photographs in the public domain?
Yes. Curtis registered his pictures for copyright as he went, which is why the Library of Congress holds more than 2,400 prints made from his original glass negatives. Those copyrights have long since expired, so the images are free to use.
Where can you see The North American Indian?
Complete sets are held by big research libraries and museums, and the Library of Congress has put part of its Curtis collection online. Bear in mind the dates in its catalogue are the years each picture was registered, not always the year it was taken.
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Sources
Smithsonian Magazine: Edward Curtis' Epic Project to Photograph Native Americans
University of Pittsburgh Library: Edward S. Curtis, After the Project
Smithsonian Magazine: Old Documentary on Western Tribes Restored
ICT News: Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, 100 Years Later
Cascade PBS: Viewing Edward Curtis Photos Through Today's Lens
Denver Public Library: 23 Years in the Making, Edward Curtis's The North American Indian
Fine Books & Collections: Harriman Set of Curtis' North American Indian
Anchorage Museum: Edward S. Curtis Photogravures collection guide
Library of Congress: Edward S. Curtis Collection, scope and background
