Dan Flores

Photography was in the air in the late 1800s, and both the technology and the possibilities entranced him.

Somewhere, Curtis acquired a how-to manual and, unable to afford the real thing, built his first camera from a wooden box and a stereoscopic lens his father brought home from the Civil War.

In 1887, when Curtis was 19, his father moved the family west to Washington State, where they homesteaded a farm just across Puget Sound from Seattle.

With income he brought in from commercial fishing and small-scale logging, young Edward finally managed to buy a 14x17 view camera.

Then, in a capitalization strategy he'd rely on most of his life, he mortgaged the Curtis farm to buy into a partnership and a photographic studio in bustling, growing Seattle.

At 24, his future beginning to open before him in what turned out to be an ill-fated move, he married a young neighbor named Clara Phillips.

For most photographers, making a living largely involves capturing images of two rather mundane subjects, weddings and families.

For four years, Curtis refined his abilities in these fields and paid the mortgage lien.

But he also dreamed of being a fine arts photographer in a new movement that saw photography as a kind of technologically assisted form of painting and the photographer as an artist.

What he needed most of all, Curtis decided, were a subject matter and a style he could make his own.

These were savvy insights.

On his mountain climbing and fishing trips, Curtis kept coming across local native people still engaged in their ancient subsistence, even as the post-frontier West whirled around them.

Fortuitously, one of these turned out to be Princess Angeline, the elderly daughter of Chief Seattle, namesake of the burgeoning city.

Curtis befriended her, and she allowed him to shoot a few soft-focus photos of her as she engaged in a timeless indigenous pursuit, digging for clams along the Pacific shore.

In a true epiphany, it struck Curtis that he should put the finished print through a sepia wash so the image looked browned, aged, so viewers would feel a timelessness about it.

Entered in the 1896 National Photographic Exhibit, it took first prize in portraiture.

Overnight, Curtis became one of Seattle's best-known photographers.

Now he had his subject and his leitmotif.

Like toppling dominoes, the breaks came in rapid succession.

Two years later, high up on the shoulders of one of his favorite peaks, Mount Rainier, Curtis encountered a lost climbing party that he guided to safety.