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This desk was handmade for John Wayne to house the 20 volumes and 20 photogravure portfolios of The North American Indian by Edward Curtis. Desk and Bookcase, Maker: Avery Rennick, 1953. Gift of the John Wayne Family, 1979.10.163.
Episode 16: Edward Curtis
Howdy folks, it’s the third week of February 2025 and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
She was a curious but familiar sight on the streets of Seattle.
Stooped over, standing in front of her waterfront cabin; she covered her head with a kerchief and her shoulders with a shawl.
She was Princess Angeline of the Duwamish (doo-wah-mish) and Suquamish ( soo-kwah-mish) people, the oldest daughter of Chief Seattle.
In 1895 she met Edward Curtis and changed his life.
Curtis photographed Princess Angeline, winning acclaim for his work and setting him on a quest that would define his life. His goal was to capture images of the ways of life of North America’s Indigenous people before it was too late.
The decades-long million-dollar project became the legacy of Curtis, who we remember on the week of his birth, February 19, 1868.
Curtis built his first camera by hand when he was just a teen. When his family moved to Seattle, the apprentice photographer was able to buy a new one and make a go of being a professional. He set up a studio and made a living shooting posed family portraits.
But outside, along the banks of Puget Sound, there was more interesting subject matter. The native people of the Northwest still fished in long canoes, and women like Princess Angeline gathered clams and mussels out of the wet sand.
Curtis’s photos of these people simply living their lives were chosen for an exhibition by the National Photographic Society, and he won the grand prize for them.
Not long after, Curtis had another chance encounter, propelling him closer to his ultimate work. While taking photos of Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a group of scientists who had become lost. He struck up a conversation with the group, gave them directions and made quick friends with one of them. George Bird Grinnell was an influential anthropologist who specialized in studying Native people.
On Grinnell’s recommendation, Curtis became the official photographer for an expedition into Alaska in 1899. Curtis then accompanied Grinnell to visit and photograph the Blackfoot people in Montana.
Those photos – frozen images of people fighting to maintain their culture in the face of dwindling land and resources – caught the attention of the country’s elite.
In 1906, J.P. Morgan, one of the country’s wealthiest men of the Gilded Age, pitched Curtis an idea.
Morgan wanted to finance a series of books Curtis would create: a massive 20-volume work called The North American Indian, featuring as many tribes as possible from West of the Mississippi. Morgan offered to pay Curtis $75,000, the equivalent of $2.5 million today.
Curtis traveled throughout the Southwest, the Plains, and then back to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
The result? 40,000 photographic images, 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native American music and language and 80 tribes visited.
But the work would eventually lead Curtis into desperate times. He never took a salary during the creation of “The North American Indian.” Money was always a problem. As a side project, he produced a motion picture with a Native American cast, but it flopped and was criticized for being an exaggerated, fictional mess. He lost his investment.
His family life suffered. His young son died of typhoid. His wife divorced him and he was arrested for failing to pay alimony.
He went to J.P. Morgan Jr. (JP Morgan Sr died in 1913) and offered to sell him back the publishing rights to The North American Indian. Curtis received a small fee and finished the final volume two years later.
Morgan later resold all the rights to the books, including the photos, negatives and plates, to a book company for only $1,000. The original project planned to print 500 sets of the complete work. In the end, less than three hundred sets were created.
A full set of Curtis’ masterwork, once owned by John Wayne, is part of the permanent collection here at The Cowboy, a gift from Wayne’s family.
Curtis spent his final years in relative obscurity, living with his daughter in Los Angeles.
Curtis died on October 19, 1952, at the age of 84, largely forgotten at the time by the art and photography world.
The mid-20th-century rediscovery of Curtis’s work sparked renewed interest in his legacy. Scholars, historians and collectors began recognizing the immense cultural and artistic value of his work The North American Indian.
Modern critics acknowledge the challenging aspects of Curtis’ representations. His depiction of Native Americans as “vanishing” is problematic because it overlooks their ongoing survival and cultural resilience. But still, many appreciate his role in preserving cultural aspects of Native American life from a specific moment in time.
And with that, we click the shutter closed on another episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
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We leave you today with the words of Edward Curtis from his introduction to Book 1 of The North American Indian: “While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence, the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.”
Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
