Dan Flores

Even the ending was straight out of a Carl May novel.

In 1954, Jark shipped his father's ashes to Bullchild, one of Rice's Blackfeet friends in Montana.

As the Chinooks ate away the snow that spring, Bullchild climbed Red Blanket Hill and spread Rice's ashes across the Blackfeet country.

Just as he had daydreamed in Germany as a boy, Vinold Rice had finally merged with the West and the Indians.

Yeah, I think those sepia images that, I mean, and that's how Curtis photographed, you know, his 200,000 photographs that he shot of Native people.

That's how he did it.

That's how he processed them.

I mean, they were black and white photographs, but he processed them in a,

chemical mix in his dark room in order to turn them brown.

And the idea, of course, was to make these look aged.

And that was kind of one of his epiphanies when, as a young man, he found himself in a position to produce a kind of a photography that could be considered art and that other people would think of him as an artist.

that was one of the insights he had.

The second insight, of course, was I'm going to make native people my focus, and I'm particularly going to photograph them as if we were still in the 1840s, the 1850s, the 1860s.

And one of the ways to make all this work is to make the images, is to do a sepia wash on them so they look like they're 100 years old or something.

And as I said early on in the script for this episode, I had a friend one time who his wife had bought him a book of Curtis photographs for Christmas one year, and we were going through them.

And he said, I got to say, I had no idea there were cameras back then.

And I said, well...

Back then, that's the rub because back then was actually as late as 1927, 1930.

So, yeah, there were cameras.

But what he's doing is he's attempting to make these images look like they're 100 years old.