Edward S. Curtis in the Pacific Northwest: Photography, Films, and Financial Failure

Edward S. Curtis in the Pacific NorthwestPhotography, Films, and Financial Failure Larry Len Peterson (bio) An excerpt from Edward S. Curtis, Printing the Legends: Looking at Shadows in a West Lit Only by Fire (Farcountry Press, January 2024) Click for larger view View full resolution Curtis (left) floats down the Columbia River in 1909 in a boat loaded with sheets of glass used to make dry plate negatives, stored in watertight chests. Edward S. Curtis, self-portrait, 1909 The New York Herald dubbed The North American Indian (TNAI) as the "most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible." Edward S. Curtis, the West's greatest Indian photographer, had a profound effect on how whites viewed the many Native American cultures. The final volume of TNAI was published in 1930. In the end, it required thirty years and over 40,000 photographs of eighty tribes along with 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Indigenous languages and music. Curtis was captivated by Pictorialism, photography inspired by Romanticism, where beautiful people were captured in beautiful settings, which made the picture appear to be like a painting. The twenty volumes contained 2,234 original photogravures (the books contained a [End Page 46] total of 1,511 photogravures and the twenty portfolios a total of 723 photogravures), 2.5 million words of anthropologic text by Curtis, and numerous transcriptions of language and music.1 In 1909, Curtis turned his attention and camera to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In an attempt to secure foreign subscriptions to TNAI, Curtis invited British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon to join him for his 1909 excursions. He joined Curtis's field team in July as they researched the Indians' annual fishing season at the mouth of the Fraser River, British Columbia. Haddon also accompanied Curtis to Montana on the Great Northern Railway, arriving in Browning in August 1909. He wrote in his unpublished memoirs, "To the east the prairie stretches illimitably; to the west it ends almost abruptly at the foot of the serried Rocky Mountains." He found Curtis magnetic and soon fell under his spell. Haddon wrote, "Mr. Curtis is essentially an artist who works through photography, and many of his studies of Indians have received fame in the United States though they are practically unknown in [Britain]." Out of respect, Haddon never published his research from his trip to America.2 The Plateau The Plateau and Woodlands regions encompass parts of the northern United States into southern Canada. The Plateau tribes—located in Idaho and western Montana, and eastern Oregon and Washington—were made up of the Yakima, Kootenai, and Nez Perce tribes. They would be featured in volumes VII, VIII, and XVIII of TNAI. The great river of the region is the Columbia. In a real sense, the story of the West is the story of its rivers and the struggle to control them. Mountains capture and shape precipitation, but rivers decide what's done with it. Over the last two hundred years, that changed. Humans began to make those decisions. In the 1890s, private western power companies built dams that not only diverted water to be used for irrigation but could also create hydropower. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Reclamation Service to champion this new technology and bring water and power to the West. It was a new era where man attempted to harness some of the West's great rivers—the Columbia, the Click for larger view View full resolution Wife of Mnaínak—Yakima Edward S. Curtis photogravure, The North American Indian, Vol. VII, 1911 Missouri River on the northern Plains and Midwest, and the Colorado River in the Southwest and Great Basin region.3 Like Curtis, little did Lewis and Clark know that when they entered the Columbia River Basin that it was home to numerous tribes, from British Columbia down the Pacific coastline and as far east as Nevada and Wyoming. Hunting and foraging kept them on the move to seasonal food sources throughout the year. After the salmon spawned on the Columbia, clogging the river, some tribal families moved on to abundant hunting grounds while...

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