by Petra Mayer,  Listen to the Story, Weekend Edition

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  Princess Angeline, the last surviving child of Chief Seattle. Curtis took this photo in his studio in 1896, shortly before Angeline’s death, at a time when it was illegal for Indians to live in the city named for her father. He paid her a dollar for the sitting. Edward Curtis/Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University

  

• Cañon de Chelly, 1904. In the heart of the Navajo Nation, where stone and sky dwarf humans on horseback, the canyon is one of the most stunning places on Earth. Edward Curtis/Library of Congress

  

• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, 1903. Curtis took this picture in his Seattle studio in the last year of Joseph’s life. Joseph died, his doctor said, of a broken heart. Edward Curtis/Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University
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  Before the Storm—Apache, 1906. In the arid high country of Arizona Territory, Curtis spent many months trying to capture Apache moments. Told the Apache had no religion, he was determined to prove otherwise. Edward Curtis/Library of Congress

  

• Mosa – Mohave, 1903. This is the picture that won over J.P. Morgan, who at first was reluctant to help Curtis with financial support. Edward Curtis/Library of Congress

  

• Wedding party, 1914. A still from the film In the Land of the Head Hunters, in which Curtis sought to re-create a mythic story of the Kwakiutl. Edward Curtis/Library of Congress
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  Heavy Load—Sioux, 1908. Curtis tried to record scenes of the hard life of a winter on the northern plains.  Edward Curtis/Library of Congress

Photographer Edward Curtis started off his career at the tail end of the 19th century, making portraits of Seattle’s wealthiest citizens. But a preoccupation with Native Americans and a chance encounter on a mountaintop triggered an idea: Curtis decided to chronicle the experience of the vanishing tribes — all of them. It was an unbelievably ambitious project that would define Curtis, his work and his legacy.

Read an excerpt

Writer Tim Egan has just completed a new biography of Curtis. It’s called Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: the Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. He tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that Curtis discovered his first subject almost by accident. “He stumbles upon this, I call her ‘the last Indian of Seattle’; it was Princess Angeline; she was the daughter of Chief Seattle, after whom the city was named.”

Angeline was living in poverty and outside the law — Seattle, named for a Native American chief, had banned Native Americans from living inside its boundaries. “So Curtis finds this bedraggled, old, broken subject, and he’s fascinated by her. … He has her come back to the studio, he sits her down and he takes this extraordinary picture of her,” Egan says. “The gaze, in the look of her face, you see something that just goes so far beyond a standard portrait picture.”

Princess Angeline’s portrait was the beginning of what Egan calls a “magnificent obsession” for Curtis: documenting the lives and traditions of Native Americans before they disappeared.. But he needed money for his project. Luckily for him, President Theodore Roosevelt got Curtis an interview with one of the richest men in America, J.P. Morgan, who initially turned him down. “Well, Curtis stays, and he opens up his portfolio, and he shows Morgan one more picture, a Mojave native, a young girl, probably about 12 years old, and Morgan is entranced by the picture,” Egan says.

Conventional wisdom of the time held that Native Americans were vanishing; within a generation they would be gone. So with funding from Morgan, Curtis was able to keep taking pictures. And those pictures were an impressive technical feat — Curtis was traveling through Hopi and Navajo land, crossing the wilds of the American Southwest, all while carrying unwieldy and fragile glass plate negatives.

The delicate glass plates were not Curtis’s only challenge — to make the images, he had to win the trust of suspicious Native American tribes. Egan says that at first, they were not inclined to let the photographer into their lives. “They threw dirt at his camera, they charged him on their horses, they tried to lure him with native women so they could then get him involved with sexual scandals,” Egan says. “And initially his approach was a very blunt one. He would pay them.”

But Curtis eventually won the trust of the tribes, partly because he did put Native people on his payroll. “By the middle of this epic, they loved him,” Egan says. “He became an insider.”

Curtis started out as a dispassionate outsider, Egan says, “knowing that he had a commodity in these Indians … but slowly, one tribe after the other, he changes. Now, he never went full native, or as they called it, ‘gone to the blanket,’ but as he became broken and old, and had things taken away from him, he truly saw the Native world from their perspective.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/10/07/162309319/catching-the-shadow-of-a-lost-world

Lake View Cemetery

As opposed to Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, which looks out onto Lake Erie, Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery looks down from Capitol Hill toward Lake Union, Portage Bay, and Lake Washington.

Established as Seattle’s Masonic Cemetery in 1872, the cemetery was renamed in 1890. It lies adjacent to Volunteer Park, which served as Washelli Cemetery until Leigh Hunt, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, demanded that the bodies lying there be moved so that the area could be enjoyed by the living. Some of these people had already been moved once before, when the city took over an original pioneer graveyard to make Denny Park.

The Denny family plot

Among those buried in Lake View Cemetery is Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Sealth who gave his name to Seattle. Angeline’s given name was Kikisoblu, but after her conversion to Christianity, she was given a new name because she was “too handsome a woman to carry a name like that.” At the crest of the hill rest four generations of the Denny family. Arthur Armstrong Denny and his wife Mary Boren Denny are credited with founding Seattle. Also in Lake View are Washington’s first governor (Elisha P. Ferry), Seattle’s first mayor (John Leary), Seattle’s first banker (Dexter Horton), and Seattle’s first shopkeeper (Dr. David Swinson Maynard, who declared his first wife dead so he could marry his second. Things turned awkward when wife #1 moved in with them, claiming half of Maynard’s land).

In the northeast corner stands the Nisei War Memorial Monument, dedicated in 1949 to Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight in World War II as a way to escape internment camps like the one in Puyallup, Washington.

Some of Lake View’s most interesting monuments draw from a wide variety of ethnic traditions, from Japanese, to Chinese, to Native American. One of my favorites was this one:

Lake View’s most famous permanent resident is Bruce Lee, who died in 1973 at the young age of 32 from cerebral edema caused by a bad reaction to a headache tablet. Beside him lies is son Brandon, who perished 20 years later at the age of 28, after being shot with an improperly loaded gun on the set of the original The Crow movie.

Bruce and Brandon Lee

Bruce’s large red granite slab identifies him as the founder of Jeet Kune Do (the Way of the Intercepting Fist), but his fans adore him for his movies: Enter the Dragon, Fists of Fury, and for upstaging the Green Hornet when he played Kato in the 1960s TV series. San Francisco-born Bruce Lee opened martial arts studios in Oakland, California and in Los Angeles, where he taught Steve McQueen and James Coburn, both of whom served as his pallbearers.

Brandon Lee’s monument is even more striking. Made of polished black granite, it has a swooping protuberance as if a shrouded figure is stepping clear of the stone. It includes a long epitaph which says in part: “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless.”

Flowers, coins, pebbles, and other tributes often surround both graves, which lie just beneath the crest of the hill facing the water.

Useful Links:
Lake View Cemetery homepage

A History of the Capitol Hill neighborhood

More information about the removable of graves from the Washelli Cemetery

Famous gravesites in Seattle

More information about Princess Angeline

Haunted Lake View Cemetery‘s report on Princess Angeline

GPS coordinates from CemeteryRegistry.us

Other Seattle links on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #49:  Greenwood Memorial Park

My visit to Greenwood Memorial Park to see Jimi Hendrix

My review of Cemeteries of Seattle (Images of America)

Our tour guide Michele was both knowledgeable and entertaining. First stop was IL Bistro a long-established Italian restaurant with a reputation for dining room ghosts. Every building in Pike Place Market has been used for assorted purposes over the years.

IL Bistro has several small tables along the wall to the far left of the entrance off Post Alley. Numerous couples have been distraught when a young woman in a white dress and long brown hair walks across the dining room heading for these two or three tables and suddenly disappears. From what I saw of her during the tour I don’t think she is aware of the modern-day patrons. She walks with determination, intent on something or someone no longer present in the building.

Similar tables in the far left corner of the dining room tend to migrate bit by bit closer to the front door of IL Bistro in warm weather. Seattle has been subject to record heat this summer and sure enough the tables have taken up inching closer and closer to the front door.

I saw a portly male ghost behind the table migrations. He was well dressed, complete with gold watch. I believe he was a local mover and shaker, a man of some importance who would have had his own table during IL Bistro’s past incarnation as a tavern with prostitutes upstairs. He was also claustrophobic, a fact he didn’t care to advertise. Interestingly the tables that try to migrate from their corner to the current front door used to sit in front of a door that once led to an outside dining area. I believe that to this day this former gentleman of means is still trying to get his reserved table outside to ease his claustrophobia under the guise of enjoying the summer air.

Our second stop was Mr. D’s Greek Delicacies in the Triangle Building. Mr. D. has an unusual way to express his artistic skills. When dignitaries, especially politicians come into town he carves their images into his huge rolls of lamb yeeros meat (sometimes spelled gyros). Then when a VIP comes in for lunch they have the dubious honor of watching themselves be carved up. Mr. D. is proud of his creations and those not served up for lunch are stored in the basement of his shop. These yeero carvings seem to both confuse and infuriate the ghosts downstairs who have the habit of tossing around pots and pans. Sometimes there are so many objects flying around that the staff at Mr. D’s cannot venture into the basement for supplies and have to wait for it to subside.

I picked up several groups of ghosts at Mr. D’s. I asked if the building had any Mafia history. Our guide Michele said no and pointed out that the current owner is Greek, not Italian. However I would swear there is a lingering gang of ghostly goodfellas in Mr. D’s basement. They predate him; I would say the 1930’s. I doubt Mr. D’s was a twinkle in his fathers eye when this crew met in the basement of his building. There was a definite sense of urgent secrecy about their meeting.

I also saw the graves of two Native Americans. This would not be surprising, as the granite hill Pike Place Market is built into was a sacred burial ground for the Duwamish Tribe a good three thousand years before the Denny party showed up to found Seattle. Seattle, like Rome is famous for being built on seven hills. It is still a steep hike up and down downtown streets, but the hills were much steeper when the early downtown core was built. In a massive two-part project called The Denny Regrade (from 1902-1911 and 1929-1930) the market hill was lowered 35 feet. All that earth was pushed into the tideflats, otherwise known as today’s Seattle waterfront. Countless Duwamish graves were tumbled into the tideflats. The total Denny Regrade project moved more earth than the building of the Panama Canal.

The odd thing about the two Native American graves under Mr. D’s foundation is they were carefully laid out. The bones are lined up, not mixed up like those pushed down the hill. These two warriors were also incredibly pissed off. They predated the goodfellas ghosts by quite a bit, but I doubt they were in the ground at the time of the Denny Regrade.

Both the goodfellas and the Native ghosts enjoy freaking people out. For this part of the tour I was standing right next to the street level wall of Mr. D’s, so close to the current basement. Once the ghosts realized I could see them they kept reaching out from the brick foundation to pluck at my slacks. I can be frightened as easily as anyone else by ghosts, but not when I know they are there and what they are up too. I will credit them as a persistent lot because my guides had to push them back four or five times before they stopped trying.

There is a popular bar in Post Alley called Kells Restaurant & Irish Pub. If you happen to be in Seattle on St. Patrick’s Day they are known for their blow out parties. Kells is owned and operated by an authentic Catholic Irish family. (Disclaimer: I happen to have grown up in the same parish and attended some of the same schools as this family. The patriarch speaks with his native Irish lilt.) Kells currently owns the entire building. Downstairs in Post Alley is the pub. Upstairs on First Ave. is a lot of empty space that has so far proven too haunted to keep a tenant.

The 1921 First Ave. Butterworth/Kells building was built during the Seattle Gold Rush. Our tour guide said it was the first “full service mortuary” in Seattle. The Edgar R. Butterworth family moved to Seattle in 1892, saw the need for undertaker services and jumped in with both feet. They opened the 1921 First Ave. building in 1903. Remember the Denny Regrade? Today’s street entrance is the original second floor of the building.

Despite an on site crematoria, the Butterworth’s couldn’t keep up with the dead bodies Seattle was racking up. Lack of a medical degree didn’t prevent Mr. Butterworth from doing all autopsies for the City of Seattle. At the time Seattle was a gold rush town, had routine influxes of just paid loggers and the inevitable services of prostitutes as women were few and demand was high.

The City of Seattle started paying ordinary citizens $50 per body to collect the dead and deliver them to Butterworth’s premises. The Butterworth’s charged $25 per body for mortuary services. That left the good citizens of Seattle with $25 cash per body, often more money than many made in a year. New arrivals from the gold fields were announced in the local paper along with their gold take and which hotel they would be staying at. This set of circumstances resulted in a boom of bodies. Local ladies of the evening became adept at picking up returning gold miners, treating them to a few drinks and enjoying a major payday the next morning. It took a full year for the City of Seattle to realize what was going on and put a stop to the “body bonuses”.

A number of restaurants have tried to set up shop on the second floor of Butterworth’s premises such as Cafe Sophie, Avenue One, Fire and Ice and most recently, Starlite Lounge. Fire and Ice lasted only seven months. Starlite Lounge did better, holding out for almost two years. The longest tenant was Avenue One who stayed open for five years. Kells has repeatedly tried to open a second bar in the space. Something always goes wrong. Permits don’t come through, troubles with construction etc…As of August 2009 the windows and front door have been papered over for nearly two years.

Interestingly as soon as tour guide Michele started talking about the troubles Kells has had in getting a paying tenant upstairs the Kells sign hanging in the second floor landing window started swinging back and forth. The longer she talked, the more it moved. I asked her about air currents up and down the stairwell behind the sign. She confirmed there is certainly lots of opportunity for air movement from both Kells Pub below and the empty floors above. However, Michele told me that every time she talks about Kells during a ghost tour one of two things happen. The Kells sign starts to move by itself or some sort of siren goes off on the street nearby. It could be emergency services or a car alarm, but one of two reactions happens each time.

Fire and Ice reported incidents of napkins placed on the bar that would routinely burst into flames yet the bar would remain untouched. One of the chefs of these ill-fated watering holes decided to stay late one night and replace light bulbs in the dining room. He shooed out the staff, locked himself inside and started replacing bulbs. He heard voices and looked up to see a group of people had entered through the current front door. He called out to them but they paid him no attention whatsoever. They walked through the dining room and back into the kitchen area. The chef quit on the spot.

I saw the group that rattled the chef. They were dressed in the clothing of the 1910’s, upswept hair, long skirts, gloves, hats, waistcoats etc… I believe they were a party of mourners come to make arrangements or attend a funeral as Butterworth’s did have a viewing chapel on site. Don’t know why they headed into the back of the building where the modern day kitchen was located. The Butterworth chapel was to the right of the front door. Maybe they were headed for Butterworth’s second floor where caskets for sale were displayed.

The ghosts of Mr. & Mrs. Butterworth are still on site, along with a few of the deceased they handled over the years. I saw a stout white-haired woman arranging flowers in the hallway outside the mortuary office. Mr. Butterworth was hanging around in the chapel space, dressed conservatively in a black wool suit.

One of the Butterworths former corpses was yelling his fool head off most of the time we were in front of the building. He was a grizzled graybeard who was the victim of one of the body bonus murderers, er, entrepreneurs. He was fresh from the Klondike and mad as hell at being murdered for the value of his corpse. He was definitely hostile. He stood in the middle of the dining room area and ranted at me in highly colorful language. Michelle passed around one of many photos taken of ghostly images in the building and sure enough… it was the face of the graybeard miner who had been screaming at me.

I sensed some group poltergeist activity, but declined to tune into their energy beyond noting it was there.

Kells Irish Pub has had it’s own haunting. The pub itself is the old Butterworth’s embalming room. The back room where there is often live music on the weekends includes the area where the body lift was located. (I am really glad I didn’t know this when I had my bachelorette party there!) Wagons or vehicles would deliver bodies back in the alley, leaving the First Ave. entrance for mourners. Dead bodies were heavy and frequently not in very good shape when they arrived. Embalming would happen downstairs and then bodies would be lifted up a floor for viewings and services.

The ladies staff room at Kells is Butterworth’s old autopsy room. Many female staff do not feel comfortable changing their uniforms in that room. I suppose that is one way to keep your employees from lingering on break!

Kells also has a mischievous red headed little girl ghost. Some years back a writer came to interview the owners of Kells. She had her young, six or seven year old daughter with her. The daughter was poking around during the interview. At one point she arrived back at the interview table with a rag doll in hand. It was a knotted rag with knots for the head, hands and feet of the doll. The mother asked her daughter where she got the doll. The answer was, from my new friend, the red headed girl. The daughter was asked to put the doll down, as it wasn’t hers. She did and wandered off again. The problem was her mother nor the Kells staff could find her. They searched and called and got no response. Finally the daughter was found in one of the back rooms, the door only cracked open a few inches. She was seated on the floor with her back to the door having an animated conversation with someone that could not be seen. When asked why didn’t she respond to her mothers calls she said she had been playing with her new friend, the red headed girl. When mother and daughter walked back into the bar area, the rag doll had vanished from the table it had been left on. I picked up on this little ghost girl’s energy. She was furious. About what, I have not figured out yet.

I don’t know why, but the mysterious red headed girl ghost seems to be attached to the family behind Kells rather than the Butterworth building or land. Certainly plenty of dead Irish came through the Butterworth premises when it was a mortuary, but this ghost doesn’t feel connected to their operation.

On a happier note, a friendly, well-known and liked ghost has started showing up at Kells again in recent weeks. He has been nicknamed Sammy by the staff. He is a young man with brown hair and a mustache. He appears in the mirrors behind Kells main bar. He is helpful, upbeat and seems to smile a lot. That is the kind of ghost I would want at my place of business.

During a dark period in Seattle history Native Americans were not allowed to stay inside the city limits past dusk. One notable exception was Princess Angeline; daughter of Chief Sealth for whom Seattle is named. She had a wooden hut at the bottom of the hill, behind the current location of Pike Place Market. The location was no accident. Princess Angeline believed the area to be sacred ground because it marked the intersection of three ley lines.

Until the tour I had no idea Seattle was covered with ley lines. Our tour guide Michele provided a map. You can hardly go anywhere downtown without being next to or on top of a ley line.

There is a small, untitled modern sculpture on First Ave. right next to the public stairs leading up to Pike Place Market. Its apex is a three-sided triangle to represent the intersection of three ley lines. There is an embedded set of quartz crystal to allow the curious to energetically cleanse their hands before trying to feel the energy of the ley lines. Most people feel a tingling sensation or a low vibration. Ironically the top of the sculpture is about an inch and a half off the location of the true intersection of ley lines. I felt this before members of the tour group started testing out the energy for themselves. Sure enough, their hands stopped an inch and a half to the right of the apex.

I decided to leave the other tour members to play with the energy since I could sense it where I was. I was standing about five feet away from the intersect line. The ghosts at Kells/Butterworth’s had been fairly unpleasant so I was a bit tense. As Michele talked about the sculpture and the significance of the location, I started to relax, almost against my will. I felt safe, calm and serene. I asked her if they had problems with anyone falling asleep at the spot because it was so relaxing. She pointed out a bench behind the sculpture and said a lot of people liked the location for meditation.

At the base of the elevators behind Pike Place Market is a modern day nursing home called Heritage House. Princess Angeline is frequently seen walking the halls of the nursing home. She is a bent over little old lady with a walking stick, wearing a red kerchief on her head. Interestingly this is pretty much how she appears in a famous black and white photo taken of her in 1896, the year of her death. Heritage House is in the general area her hut stood, so you could say she has a right to be there. Both staff and patients have seen her. There is a story that if a patient wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Princess Angeline standing next to their bed that they are not long for this world. That sounds creepy, but it doesn’t have to be. With Princess Angeline I had a strong sense of her compassion and feeling responsible for the people living in Heritage House. If that story tends to pan out, I suspect Princess Angeline is part of what I would call the “welcoming committee” I have seen for so many people who have died or are about to pass on. Frequently it is family and friends who have already died. Honestly if I saw Princess Angeline as part of my welcoming committee I would be honored. She has the best interests of those she looks after at heart.

This became crystal clear as we headed back up the elevator after visiting the ley line sculpture. I saw Princess Angeline standing behind the glass front door of Heritage House scolding our tour group. “Be quiet! They are sleeping!” She had one finger up to her lips in a signal for quiet. She was stern and adamant we didn’t wake up her sleeping patients.

There were lots more stories and more ghosts, but those are the highlights of my Pike Place Market Ghost Tour. They were flexible about us bringing our own ghost hunting equipment and gracious about having a professional medium on tour with them. Many thanks to both Mercedes and Michele! If you get a chance, definitely take the Pike Place Market Ghost Tour. It is worth every cent of the $15 per person fee. You can check them out at: http://www.seattleghost.com/

Blessings,

Lynne

Lynne Olson can be contacted for private readings via email at:  angelzhands@yahoo.com

(C) 2010 Lynne Olson. All rights reserved.

One, ‘Chief Seattle,’ would go on to fame and fortune as the official rose of the Seattle Centennial, which was held from 1951-52. ‘Chief Seattle’ was a big, 40-petal rose, said to be the same size as the familiar ‘Peace‘ rose. The plants had the same habit. Though I’ve never found a color photo of this rose, old magazines say it was colored light buff, with coral at the center. As the flowers faded, the coral softened to cream. It was fragrant and even disease resistant. In trials held by All-America Rose Selections, ‘Chief Seattle’ was judged the best rose of 1949.

We know less about the rose ‘Princess Angeline.’ It was a dark red rose, and old descriptions call it “low growing” and “free blooming.”

Both these roses were developed by Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario, California. In Seattle, nurseries featured them in newspaper ads, suggesting that they were both popular and readily available. Many Seattle-area gardeners probably grew them, and some of those old plants may still survive.

Sad to say, neither of these roses show up in the trade today. Still, these roses may still be out there somewhere. If you have either of these roses, or know somebody who does, please let me know. Roses are easy to propagate from a cutting, which can be done without harming the plant. I’d like to see these two historic roses back in a public garden, where everybody can see and enjoy them.

In the mid 1890s, Curtis began photographing local Puget Sound Native Americans digging for clams and mussels on the tide flats.

One of his earliest models was Princess Angeline, the aged daughter of Sealth, the Suquamish chief after whom Seattle was named. Later, as an official photographer of the 1899 Harriman Expedition, Curtis documented the geological features of the Alaskan wilderness as well as its indigenous population. This was a pivotal experience for Curtis and greatly increased his interest in Native cultures. He visited tribal communities in Montana and Arizona and began in earnest to photograph many other Native Americans in the West, spending more time in the field and less time in his studio.

The North American Indian Project

In the early years of the 20th century, Curtis embarked on a thirty-year mission which he described as an effort “to form a comprehensive and permanent record of all the important tribes of the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their…customs and traditions.” Along with most scholars of this period, he believed that indigenous communities would inevitably be absorbed into white society, losing their unique cultural identities. He wanted to create a scholarly and artistic work that would document the ceremonies, beliefs, customs, daily life, and leaders of these groups before they “vanished.” The North American Indian project, Curtis decided, would be a set of 20 volumes of ethnographic text illustrated with high quality photoengravings taken from his glass plate negatives. Each of these volumes would be accompanied by a portfolio of large size photogravures, elegantly bound in leather and printed on the highest quality paper. To fund the enormous project, Curtis would sell subscriptions to five hundred sets of the publication.

Working alone or with various assistants, soliciting donations and support from diverse sources including President Theodore Roosevelt and the railroad tycoon John Pierpont Morgan, and also accumulating a heavy personal debt, Curtis visited more than eighty tribes across the country, and north into Alaska and parts of Canada. Eventually, he took more than 40,000 photographs; made over 10,000 recordings of Native speech and music; produced lectures, slide shows, and a multi-media Curtis Indian Picture Opera throughout the U.S.; and in 1914 directed In the Land of the Headhunters, an inventive, seminal film documentary on the Kwakiutl tribe.

Volume one of The North American Indian appeared in 1907. In 1930 the last two volumes were finally published, completing nearly thirty years of work. Only 272 complete sets had been printed. By this time, the modest popularity of Curtis’s work had diminished and the North American Indian Corporation–the business enterprise overseeing Curtis’s ethnographic ventures–soon liquidated its assets. When he died in 1952, his lifework with Native Americans had all but faded into obscurity. “Rediscovered” in the 1960s and 1970s, Curtis’s photographic work is now recognized as one of the most significant records of Native culture ever produced. His photographs have been included in virtually every anthology of historical photographs of Native Americans and are now frequently used to illustrate books and documentaries.

The Prints and Photographs Division Curtis collection consists of more than 2,400 silver-gelatin, first generation photographic prints–some of which are sepia-toned–made from Curtis’s original glass negatives. Most of the photographic prints are 5″ x 7″ although nearly one hundred are 11″ x 14″ and larger; many include the Curtis file or negative number within the image at the lower left-hand corner. Acquired by the Library of Congress through copyright deposit from about 1900 through 1930, the dates on the images reflect date of registration, not when the photograph was actually taken. About two-thirds (1,608) of these images were not published in the North American Indian volumes and therefore offer a different and unique glimpse into Curtis’s work with indigenous cultures. The original glass plate negatives–most of which had been stored and nearly forgotten in a basement of New York’s Morgan Library–were unwittingly dispersed during World War II. Many others were destroyed and some were sold as junk. Although the Prints and Photographs Division does not hold any of the few existing original glass negatives, copy negatives for many of the photographic prints have been made by the Library’s Duplication Services.

Images from each of the geo-cultural regions documented in The North American Indian are represented in the collection: the Pacific Northwest, New Southwest, Great Basin, Great Plains, Plateau Region, California, and Alaska. Included are both studio and field photographs. A large number are individual or group portraits, and many subjects are identified by name. Other subjects include traditional and ceremonial dress, dwellings and other structures, agriculture, arts and crafts, rites and ceremonies, dances, games, food preparation, transportation, and scenery.

The Library of Congress staff organized the photographs into twenty-two groups (LOTs 12310 through 12331) primarily by geographical area and thereunder by tribal group and, when a Curtis number exists, numerically by the number Curtis assigned to the image. One LOT comprised of 11″ x 14″ and larger photographs was grouped together because of size and represents a number of different tribes (LOT 12331). A complete alphabetical list of tribal groups represented in the collection, followed by corresponding LOT number and corresponding North American Indian volume number is available in the Appendix found at the end of this document. It is also available in the Curtis finding aid in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room.

Automated Records for Individual Images and LOT Descriptions

Many Curtis images can be viewed in digitized form in the Prints and Photographs Division Online Catalog. The twenty-two LOTs are represented by catalog records that provide textual summaries of the contents of the group (accessible through the “Groups in High Demand” search screen). The records also provide a link that enables one to view any of the items from the LOT that have so far been cataloged online and digitized. Online searches across all categories in the online catalog for a specific tribal group (such as “Hopi” and “Cayuse”) or subject (such as “ceremonies” and “baskets”) will yield appropriate individual images as well as appropriate LOT descriptions.

Photographic Prints in LOTS 12310 through 12331

The original photographic prints can be viewed in the Prints and Photographs reading room by requesting one or more LOTs. The contents of each LOT (including the tribal groups represented, description summary, and number of items) are described in the online group records mentioned above. LOT descriptions and an alphabetical list of tribal groups represented in the collection are also available in the Curtis finding aid in the reading room.

The North American Indian

A reprint of the original Curtis work is housed in the Prints and Photographs Division reference book collection [LC call number: E77 C98 and E77 C98 suppl]. The first twenty volumes contain illustrations and text. Twenty supplemental sections consisting of large reproductions of the original photogravures are bound in an additional four volumes. The North American Indian volumes in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room have been marked with a LOT number and any existing Curtis file number and reproduction number when a corresponding photographic print can be found in a Curtis Collection LOT. A complete alphabetical list of tribal groups with corresponding LOT number and The North American Indian volume number is located at the beginning of each large supplemental volume.

Card Indexes in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room

The Edward S. Curtis shelflist by Curtis number is arranged by Curtis file number (by title for images without a number). Most cards note Curtis number, LOT number, title, copyright date, tribal group, geographical location, reproduction number, and description. If the image was published in The North American Indian, the volume and plate or page number are also noted. A second card index is arranged by LOT number and tribal group.

Photographic prints or transparencies can be ordered directly from the Library of Congress, Duplication Services, Washington, D.C., 20540-5230 (email: photoduplication@loc.gov; telephone: 202-707-5640). Order forms, a price list, and order instructions will be provided on request. Although the Library does not hold the original glass negatives, copy negatives for many images have been made by the Photoduplication Service either from the original photographic prints in the Prints and Photographs Division or from the photogravure prints in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Orders for copies must be accompanied by a reproduction number for the requested image or, if no reproduction number exists, the call number (LOT and item number or LOT and item title) of the original image.