September 18, 2025

Edward Sherriff Curtis does not look like your typical bookish type. In a famous 1899 photo—a self-portrait in his trademark sepia-toned style—he sports a rakish felt slouch hat, turtleneck sweater, white canvas jacket, and Van Dyke beard, suggesting a more refined Buffalo Bill.

And yet, this former homesteader, a six-foot-two, thirty-year-old citizen of gold rush-era Seattle, launched the most expensive and expansive book project by an individual. It is the largest ethnographic enterprise ever undertaken in the United States: The North American Indian.

Between 1895 and 1930, he amassed thousands of images from roughly eighty tribes. Of these, 1,500 large-format photogravure prints on fine paper made the final cut for his magnum opus of oversize folios accompanied by twenty text volumes. The bound books alone take up five feet of shelf space.

Awed by the fledgling medium, photography, Curtis’s indigenous subjects nicknamed him “Shadow Catcher,” but the record he left is much more substantial. On hundreds of Edison wax cylinders, he preserved stories, ceremonies, and music by people who, his fellow countrymen thought, would soon be extinct. However, surviving Manifest Destiny, they turned to Curtis’s collections to revive forgotten customs, to reconnect with a heritage that was quickly fading from view.

The man in the picture does not look like a typical family man, either.

He was and he wasn’t. Footloose, a workaholic prone to depression, he sacrificed wedded bliss on ambition’s altar. His wife divorced him due to his long absences in pursuit of his books. Still, throughout his life, E.S. Curtis remained close to his second child and eldest daughter, Beth. She was his manager in Seattle, funded his Alaska venture and helped set up and run a new studio when he moved to Los Angeles.

His daughter Florence, who was less familiar with her absentee father, urged him to write and record parts of his life story during his twilight years.

Having served as the official photographer on the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition from Seattle to Siberia, Curtis left for his second cruise to Alaska on the steamer Victoria in the summer of 1927, accompanied by daughter Beth and the young ethnologist Stewart Eastwood. He travelled in less stately fashion this time, on a tight budget. After arriving in Nome, the trio continued to Nunivak, King Island, Little Diomede, Kotzebue, Selawik, Noatak, and Cape Prince of Wales.

Curtis had never been happier, as the Native culture there still seemed vibrant, and Alaska reminded him of youthful adventures in the Pacific Northwest. For the first time in his career, he kept a day-by-day journal.

Nome, on the other hand, was but a husk of its gold rush self. Its population had shrunk from 20,000 to 750, most of them Eskimos. Stores, shops, hotels, and gambling dens housed only the wind. Sidewalk boards were broken or missing. It was “a deserted mining town,” Curtis wrote. They stayed at the Golden Gate Hotel, where “the floors sag to the four winds” and “If you want a bath, you arrange it for today and perhaps you will get it tomorrow.”

Curtis bought a fishing boat, Jewel Guard, which came with its previous owner. They called her a “mud hen,” an alias for the American coot, a drab, tubby marsh bird with shortish wings. But she wore a white coat of paint, with dark, elegant trimming, radiant as an albatross, on a sunny day. According to Beth, the skipper—Harry the Fish, a Swede—hated liquor, tobacco, and women. He had a reputation as a “sea coward,” but he may have been simply protecting his health, passengers, freight, and investment.

The boat, about forty feet long, two-masted, with a cabin, Beth deemed “not so bad.” Curtis, who had some experience with seagoing vessels, thought her “an ideal craft for muskrat hunting in the swamps but certainly never designed for storms in the Arctic Ocean.”

Nomeites had warned the roving photographer against pushing his luck by launching so late in the season. Foolhardy, perhaps, but with only the last volume left to be finished, Curtis insisted on one more adventure.

Less than a week out at sea, the travellers struck ice while a storm walloped them. “The waves were ten times as great as our boat & we were shipping much water,” Beth wrote. When, after nearly capsizing, Jewel Guard stranded on a sandbar, Curtis waded away from the ship, set up his tripod, and snapped her portrait.

After visiting Nunivak and the grim Hooper Bay, Curtis guessed that 75 percent of the residents suffered from tuberculosis. Beth flew back from Nome to Fairbanks and from there travelled home to L.A. Curtis, Eastwood, and Harry the Fish laboured on to more remote communities.

King Island, which Curtis described as a storm-beaten rock, in his opinion, was also one of the most picturesque spots in the North. Unlike any other village on the continent, the hive of “box houses” clung to precipitous cliffs, shored up by driftwood stilts. It lay ghostly abandoned; its inhabitants now summered near Nome. Curtis hoped to interview King Islanders upon his return to fill in the cultural context. The photos brought back from the island are haunting still lifes, time capsules of a society whose gaze focused outward, onto the vast, immutable sea.

Anchored off Cape Prince of Wales, Curtis and his crew received visitors, “fully 50 of them,” walrus hunters in three large skin boats, who clambered on deck until Curtis feared that Jewel Guard would founder under the load. Curtis hired a local to act as interpreter at his next stop, Little Diomede Island. There, he got lucky with the weather, landed, and promptly went to work. The wife of a missionary told him it was the only perfect day that year; in fact, the finest she had seen in her four years on the island. A flu epidemic had ravaged Diomede’s population, but the honeyed, late-summer evening light must have thrilled Curtis—he worked sixty hours, during which he slept four and a half.

Storms caught up again with Curtis at Kotzebue, where a pilot he’d hired got them mired and lost in the mudflats. The pilot later admitted that he knew everything there was to know about driving dog teams, but not much about guiding big boats.

A canoe excursion took Curtis and Eastwood to Noatak Village, where both worked hard for several days; Curtis found time to praise “the fine flavor of Noatak salmon trout” [steelhead or anadromous rainbow trout]. Working there, Curtis faced opposition from the missionaries. Ironically, these were members of the “Religious Society of Friends,” evangelical Quakers. Curtis, interested in the pre-Christian past, insisted on speaking to local Inupiat, whom the Quakers maligned as “Devil People” (those who refused to convert and often were ostracized for it).

Curtis and his company only left Kotzebue on September 10. The days were getting short, the barometric pressure was falling, the land was white with new snow, and the locals were putting up boats for the winter.

The next day, a blizzard assailed Jewel Guard, with visibility “ten degrees less than pea soup.” It snowed so heavily that flakes depressed the breakers. Harry the Fish frothed at the gills because they had not sailed sooner. The hull sprang a leak from seams that the tossing and pounding worked loose, and the ocean pressed in until the engine room floor lay a foot underwater.

Threatened with freezing in place until spring, the skipper decided to run for Nome instead of beaching the boat for repairs. The crew manned the hand-pump, clanking away for half of the time. It was so cold that spray and seas slopping onto the deck bonded with snow into an ice carapace, which the men kept chopping off.

On the home stretch, Jewel Guard found her wings, more gull now than mud hen. She flew “before the gale merely hitting the [waves’] high spots.”Her crew in Nome had been given up for dead. Curtis, though, had been stoic: “You either make it or you don’t.” The main thing, he felt afterward, was the images that he had netted and saved in a tight box from ruin, the capstone of his career and some of his finest work.

Seen from a strictly commercial perspective, Curtis was not successful, as Timothy Egan showed in his fine biography. In 1925, Curtis surrendered the rights to The North American Indian to industrialist J.P. Morgan’s son, who, filling his father’s Oxfords, had stepped in years before to fund the costly project. Sinking into obscurity during the Great Depression, Curtis was hospitalized in Denver for mental and physical exhaustion.

The ultimate praise for his life’s work, albeit belated, came from those whom Edward S. Curtis had sought to honour. Curtis’s obsession has given us “indispensable images of every human being at every time in every place,” wrote Paul Ongtooguk (Inupiaq). The images, for Ongtooguk, “filled the missing pieces from my memory.” The very best teleported him to his treeless home, “culturally and sometimes personally.”

Banner Image: A Yup'ik kayaker near Nunivak Island aims his hunting dart with an atlatl throwing board. (Credit: Library of Congress)