[4][5] His father, the Reverend Asahel "Johnson" Curtis (1840–1887), was a minister, farmer, and American Civil War veteran[6] born in Ohio.

[4] Weakened by his experiences in the Civil War, Johnson Curtis had difficulty in managing his farm, resulting in hardship and poverty for his family.

[10] Grinnell became interested in Curtis's photography and invited him to join an expedition to photograph people of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana in 1900.

[3] In 1906, after seeking an introduction through Belle de Costa Greene,[9] and with her approval, J. P. Morgan provided Curtis with $75,000 (equivalent to over $2.5 million in 2024) to produce a series on Native Americans.

Morgan's funds were to be disbursed over five years and were earmarked to support only fieldwork for the books, not for writing, editing, or production of the volumes.

[12] For general assistance with logistics and fieldwork, he hired Bill Phillips, a graduate of the University of Washington and Alexander B. Upshaw a member of the Absaroke tribe (‘Crow’).

[13] Frederick Webb Hodge, an anthropologist employed by the Smithsonian Institution, was hired to edit the series, based on his experience researching and documenting Native American people and culture in the southwestern United States.

He wrote in the introduction to his first volume in 1907, "The information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost."

He recorded tribal lore and history, described traditional foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral customs.

Curtis chose the Kwakiutl tribe, of the Queen Charlotte Strait region of the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada, for his subject.

On October 16, 1924, Curtis sold the rights to his ethnographic motion picture In the Land of the Head-Hunters to the American Museum of Natural History.

[3] In 1935, the Morgan estate sold the rights to The North American Indian and remaining unpublished material to the Charles E. Lauriat Company in Boston for $1,000 plus a percentage of any future royalties.

Following the divorce, the two oldest daughters, Beth and Florence, remained in Seattle, living in a boarding house separate from their mother.

[3] On October 19, 1952, at the age of 84, Curtis died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, in the home of his daughter Beth.

A brief obituary appeared in The New York Times on October 20, 1952: Edward S. Curtis, internationally known authority on the history of the North American Indian, died today at the home of a daughter, Mrs. Beth Magnuson.

About two-thirds (1,608) of these images were not published in The North American Indian and therefore offer a different glimpse into Curtis's work with indigenous cultures.

The original glass plate negatives, which had been stored and nearly forgotten in the basement of the Morgan Library, in New York, were dispersed during World War II.

[7] Around 1970, David Padwa, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, went to Boston to search for Curtis's original copper plates and photogravures at the Charles E. Lauriat rare bookstore.

He discovered almost 285,000 original photogravures as well as all the copper plates and purchased the entire collection which he then shared with Jack Loeffler and Karl Kernberger.

[citation needed] Charles Goddard Weld purchased 110 prints that Curtis had made for his 1905–06 exhibit and donated them to the Peabody Essex Museum, where they remain.

[23]Two hundred seventy-six of the wax cylinders made by Curtis between 1907 and 1913 are held by the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.

[24] These include recordings of music of the following Native American groups: Clayoquot, Cowichan, Haida, Hesquiat, and Kwakiutl, in British Columbia; and Arapaho, Cheyenne, Cochiti, Crow, Klikitat, Kutenai, Nez Percé, Salish, Shoshoni, Snohomish, Wishram, Yakima, Acoma, Arikara, Hidatsa, Makah, Mandan, Paloos, Piegan, Tewa (San Ildefonso, San Juan, Tesuque, Nambé), and possibly Dakota, Clallam, Twana, Colville and Nespelim in the western United States.

Elaborated since the 1820s, this ideological construct effectively captured the ambivalent racism of Anglo-American society, which repressed Native spirituality and traditional customs while creating cultural space for the invented Indian of romantic imagination.

[Since the 1960s,] Curtis's sepia-toned photographs (in which material evidence of Western civilization has often been erased) had special appeal for this 'Red Power' movement and even helped inspire it.

But in recent years anthropologists and others, even when they have censured what they have assumed were Curtis' methodological assumptions or quarrelled with the text's conclusions, have begun to appreciate the value of the project's achievement: exhibitions have been mounted, anthologies of pictures have been published, and The North American Indian has increasingly been cited in the researches of others ...

The men, women, and children in The North American Indian seem as alive to us today as they did when Curtis took their pictures in the early part of the twentieth century.

When judged by the standards of his time, Curtis was far ahead of his contemporaries in sensitivity, tolerance, and openness to Native American cultures and ways of thinking.

At the time when he was witnessing their squalid conditions on reservations first-hand, some were attempting to find their place in and adapt to mainstream U.S. culture and its economy, while others were actively resisting it.

[35] In his photogravure In a Piegan Lodge, published in The North American Indian, Curtis retouched the image to remove a clock between the two men seated on the ground.

It has been suggested that he altered and manipulated his pictures to create an ethnographic, romanticized simulation of native tribes untouched by Western society.