Edward Curtis

Chief of the Desert

1904

Born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America's finest photographers and ethnologists. Beginning in 1896 and ending in 1930, Curtis photographed and documented every major Native American tribe west of the Mississippi, taking over 40,000 negatives of eighty tribes. For thirty years, he devoted his life to an odyssey of photographing and documenting the lives and traditions of the Native people of North America. His photographs had an immense impact on the national imagination and continue to shape the way we see Native life and culture. His life's work was to record the faces and lifestyles of the Indians before they vanished forever beneath the settling of the continent by the white man. He photographed his subjects from the deserts of the Southwest to the ice floes of the Arctic, recording with his camera and pen the look and the culture of more than eighty tribes. It was an achievement both poignant and monumental.