Dan Flores

So we're back to the fact that rarely do his photos show Indian life as it actually was in the post-frontier.

Instead, Curtis went to extraordinary lengths to exercise the whole 20th century.

He provided his Indian subjects with outfits and props from a half century earlier.

He airbrushed away power lines in his photos, once even used darkroom tricks to erase an alarm clock he found to his horror beside the right elbow of his Blackfeet subject in the stunning 1870s-looking photo in a pagan lodge.

Of the more than 22,000 photographs in the North American Indian, a few can't be trusted or are questionable today for other reasons.

Sometimes Indians duke Curtis.

Some of the Navajos did their ceremonies backwards for his camera.

As one of the only white men ever to participate in the nine-day Hopi snake dance, Curtis even photographed that sacred ritual.

Today, the Hopis don't even allow non-Indians to see this ceremony.

It's not easy then to know what to think about Curtis.

Listening to George horse capture helps though.

A defender of Curtis, horse capture remains awestruck at Curtis's dedication to his project and at the stunning quality of the resulting imagery.

Most importantly, he believes that Curtis's work strengthens Native confidence.

What Curtis's images show is that what Indians suspected about the depth and beauty of their ancestors' culture in the Old West was true.

As Curtis was journeying to tribe after tribe, then disappearing into his dark room, all over the West, painters were fixing images of native people and the Old West as rapidly as they could work.

Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell became the most famous and successful.

The artists captivated by Indians believed their subjects were vanishing, so artists like Joseph Henry Sharp, who particularly focused on the crows, and Taos and Santa Fe-based painters like E. Irving Kaus, Ernest Blumenshine, and John Sloan captured the pueblos of the Southwest at a frantic pace.

At a time when railroads were one of the biggest businesses in the country, tourism seemed the future, and nothing advertised a Western adventure in a strange land like images of exotic natives.

Vino Rice, who immersed himself in the Northwest between roughly 1920 and 1950, was one of the painters who attracted the attention of a Western railroad.

Rice's mission began very much in the genre that Curtis, Remington, Blumenshine, and others had already laid out.