Dan Flores

It was the kind of group any ambitious young man might want to run into, let alone rescue.

The party included Gifford Pinchot of the U.S.

Forestry Division, C. Hart Merriam, head of the U.S.

Biological Survey, and most importantly for Curtis, the famous author George Byrd Grinnell.

He was a photographer, Curtis told them, and back in Seattle when he showed them some of his photographs, including his early Indian works, they were impressed.

Grinnell and Miriam both had already signed on for an upcoming grand expedition financed by railroad tycoon E.H.

Harriman to Alaska the next summer.

Might young Curtis be interested in accompanying the party as photographer?

This was the domino that collapsed the table.

The Harriman Expedition included three dozen of America's most famous scientists, writers, artists, a kind of Camelot afloat on the Alaskan seas.

Curtis got to rub shoulders with the natural history writers John Muir and John Burroughs, the geologist Grove Carl Gilbert, biologists William Dahl, Frederick Dellenbaugh, and William Brewer,

even Mr. Harriman himself.

They were the core of Washington's prestigious Cosmos Club.

For Curtis, the trip served as passport to the whole American scientific and conservation community.

And the ship, the George W. Elder, was, in John Muir's words, a floating university, providing Curtis the education he'd never gotten.

He was 31 years old.

The trip particularly made Grinnell a good friend, and the writer now invited Curtis along in the summer of 1900 to a Plains Indian Sundance among the Blackfeet on their reservation in Montana.

All of Curtis's life had been preparation for this moment.

As he wrote later, he was intensely affected.

It was the start of my effort to learn about the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives.