Edward Curtis was born in 1868 in rural Wisconsin. His father, Reverend Johnson Curtis, had returned from the Civil War penniless and debilitated; Curtis and his siblings grew up in poverty, with the entire family occasionally going for days or even weeks at a time subsisting solely on a diet of potatoes. Yet Reverend Curtis and his wife Ellen managed to raise a family of four children, of which Edward was the second. Before his fifth birthday, the family moved to rural Cordova, Minnesota, where his father continued his vocation as an itinerant preacher. Even though Curtis undoubtedly had some contact with American Indians while growing up in Minnesota, most traditional Indian life there had disappeared by the time he and his family arrived in the 1870s, and no specific record exists of any American Indian influence on his life at that time.
Reverend Curtis ministered to a very sparsely populated parish, and Edward often accompanied him on long treks to visit his far-flung congregation. These treks, which included frequent journeys by canoe, may well have been the inception of his love of the outdoors. Having completed his formal education at age twelve, Curtis built himself a camera, using a stereopticon lens his father had brought back from the Civil War fifteen years earlier and $1.25 for the remaining parts. Demonstrating the self-direction, ingenuity, and independence that would be hallmarks of his adult life, Curtis thus unwittingly embarked on his photographic career.
By his mid-teens, Curtis had spent a great deal of time reading about and experimenting with photographic techniques and ideas. At the age of seventeen, he moved to St. Paul, MN where he spent time as an apprentice photographer. Curtis was soon well versed in the fundamentals of photography and had become a serious and dedicated practitioner.
In 1887 his father’s worsening health mandated that the family move to a more temperate climate, and they chose the booming Pacific Northwest. This move to the Puget Sound area near Seattle would later play a major role in Curtis’s interest in the American Indians. Initially, however, Curtis would not be able to pursue his love of photography. His father’s health had been further weakened by the journey, and he died shortly after the move. Responsibility for the family’s income fell primarily to Edward. For several years the family lived a life of bare subsistence, with Edward and his younger brother Asahel gathering seafood and picking fruit and vegetables. At times menial jobs were available, and by 1890 the family managed to purchase a modest homestead.
Following his entrepreneurial bent, Curtis secured a loan using the family homestead as collateral and quickly parlayed the proceeds into a share in a small Seattle photography studio. The fact that he was willing to put at risk the family’s hard-earned security to pursue his vision was indicative of the strength and depth of his passion for photography and his belief in his ability to succeed in business. Two years later, having established a modicum of financial stability, Curtis married a family friend, Clara Phillips. They began a family almost immediately and had four children: Harold, Beth, Florence, and Katherine.
The North American Indian was perhaps the most ambitious publication ever undertaken by a single man, and it was widely hailed as a landmark in American publishing history. In 1911, the New York Herald said that it was the most gigantic undertaking since the publication of the King James Edition of the Bible.
Patron contributions covered only about thirty-five percent of the final cost, forcing Curtis to struggle incessantly to raise funds. These difficulties were exacerbated by the great financial panic of 1907, which seriously hurt subscription sales of The North American Indian and reversed much of the initial momentum that was so important to the project’s success.
In reality, the undertaking was in financial trouble throughout the entire twenty-four-year period between 1906 and 1930, but Curtis constantly strived to keep his project afloat. In addition to being the principal fundraiser for The North American Indian, he also maintained a grueling lecture and exhibition schedule, actively sold original photographs, and invested heavily in a feature-length film in an unrelenting effort to support the disappointing sale of subscriptions for the limited-edition books. His financial resources were especially strained from the beginning of World War I until 1921, and the project was essentially moribund during that period.
Some share of responsibility for the great financial burden of the project can be placed on Curtis. While the logistical and financial requirements of the fieldwork were constant, the expenses related to publishing the books were staggering. The craftsmanship and the materials Curtis insisted on were of the highest possible quality, and his rigorous standards made each set of The North American Indian very expensive. In addition, Curtis selected the difficult and expensive process of photogravure for both the volume and the portfolio prints. This process allowed Curtis to make prints of great subtlety and beauty with a high degree of consistency, but the resulting expense of each set led to a steep shortfall in sales. Of a projected five hundred sets, less than three hundred were actually produced, and only two hundred fourteen were sold during Curtis’s involvement in the project. It is estimated that he needed to sell four hundred sets just to break even.
Curtis had established himself as Seattle’s foremost studio photographer by 1896, and this success gave him a newfound level of financial freedom that allowed him to spend time away from the studio to pursue his love of the great outdoors. His trips to photograph the area’s spectacular mountain and ocean scenery led him to encounter small pockets of American Indians who still maintained some vestiges of their traditional lifestyles. By this time, Curtis had begun exploring an interest that would ultimately result in the most comprehensive photo–ethnographic record of the North America Indians ever created. By 1898 Curtis had begun receiving recognition from both the photographic community and the general public for his American Indian photographs. The same year, a chance event occurred that significantly altered the course of his life. While on one of his many mountaineering trips, Curtis rescued a lost party of climbers on Mount Rainier that included several prominent people nationally recognized for their work in conservation, Indian ethnography, and publishing. The men were grateful for his assistance, and several took a professional interest in his photographic work, among them George Bird Grinnell. This led directly to an invitation for Curtis to join an important scientific expedition in 1899. Curtis’s participation in this expedition gave him his first real grounding in the discipline and rigors of the scientific method. The expedition, organized by railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, included many of the country’s most noted scientists, ethnographers’ and naturalists. Known as the Harriman Alaskan Expedition, the venture lasted nearly three months and covered thousands of miles between Seattle and the Arctic Circle.
By the turn of the century, with his Seattle studio business booming, Curtis’s photographs of Indians were winning national awards and being exhibited internationally, bringing him a new source of income and recognition. The stage was thus set when George Bird Grinnell invited Curtis to join him on another expedition, in the summer of 1900, to witness the Sun Dance ceremony in Montana. Grinnell, who was known as the Father of the Blackfoot, had spent twenty seasons in the field with the Blackfoot and Piegan and had established a position of knowledge and trust that opened new doors for Curtis that fateful summer. It was this access to closely held native rituals and spiritual beliefs that so profoundly changed his life. Equally important were the personal interactions between Curtis and several native individuals. Thus, on his return to Seattle, he stayed only a few weeks before embarking on his first self-financed, self- directed trip into the field: a journey to the Southwest to meet the Navajo, Apache, and Hopi peoples of Arizona.
By design, the photogravures were offered exclusively as part of the twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of The North American Indian; but during his extensive travels throughout the United States to lecture, Curtis actively promoted the sale of other kinds of original photographs. He was an exceptional photographic craftsman and a master printer, and, to make up for the financial shortfalls created by the publication of The North American Indian, he offered individual nongravure prints to the public. Curtis had experimented with a number of different photographic techniques, and this experience allowed him to create markets for photographs produced with a variety of processes, including platinum prints, gelatin silver prints, cyanotypes, goldtones, and hand colored prints. These sales helped assuage the financial hemorrhaging to a small degree, and Curtis finally managed to complete volumes and portfolios twelve through twenty between 1921 and 1930.
The intensity with which Curtis pursued his dream did little for his health or well-being. Having driven himself to the limit for many years, he suffered a nervous and physical breakdown in 1930, soon after the project was completed. Following his recovery two years later, he spent the last twenty years of his life in Los Angeles with his beloved daughter Beth. He died in 1952, essentially unknown and penniless.