Dan Flores

He would preserve the Indian world before Indian-ness, as Curtis and all his new friends firmly believed would happen, would vanish for all time.

What Curtis had in mind was a monumental undertaking.

But it wasn't until 1906 that J.P.

Morgan finally bankrolled him with $75,000 for his grand project.

Morgan's deal wasn't much of a bargain.

He wanted Curtis to do the field and print work, plus, in the manner of John James Audubon, to publish and even market the finished books himself.

Curtis called the books in question the North American Indian, and they came near to being stillborn at the outset.

When the anthropological community got word of what Curtis was proposing, a photographic record of traditional Indian life, three decades after most tribes had settled on the reservations, it ran up a red flag.

Professor Franz Boas at Columbia expressed what still is the most obvious objection.

In the 20th century, what Curtis was proposing was impossible.

Despite widespread nostalgia for the Old West, by the early 1900s, most tribes had already endured decades of systematic policy-driven acculturation.

To show traditional Indian life as it was lived in the 1800s, Curtis would have to fake the details and most of the context of his project.

Boas's objections did lead to President Roosevelt appointing a committee to investigate those arguments.

But the committee included William H. Holmes of the Bureau of Ethnology, who despised Boas and who knew Roosevelt wanted Curtis to succeed.

Roosevelt, in fact, wrote the foreword to Volume 1.

And it's easy to conclude that the president was as caught up in the romance of the undertaking as Curtis.

Nonetheless, a reputation as the great fabricator has been Curtis's albatross ever since.

Curtis was in over his head anyway.

He was young, energetic, and inspired, and thought he could wrap up the entire project in five years.

But if dated from that 1900 Sundance in Montana where he got the idea, it actually took up 30 years of his life.