100 PHOTOGRAPHS 47
Native Americans were the great casualty of the U.S.’s
grand westward advance. As settlers tamed the seemingly
boundless stretches of the young nation, they evicted Indi-
ans from their ancestral lands, shoving them into impover-
ished reservations and forcing them to assimilate. Fearing
the imminent disappearance of America’s first inhabitants,
Edward S. Curtis sought to document the assorted tribes,
to show them as a noble people—“the old time Indian, his
dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners.” Over more
than two decades, Curtis turned these pictures and obser-
vations into The North American Indian, a 20- volume chroni-
cle of 80 tribes. No single image embodied the project bet-
ter than The Vanishing Race, his picture of Navajo riding off
into the dusty distance. To Curtis the photo epitomized the
plight of the Indians, who were “passing into the darkness
of an unknown future.” Alas, Curtis’ encyclopedic work did
more than convey the theme—it cemented a stereotype.
Railroad companies soon lured tourists west with trips to
glimpse the last of a dying people, and Indians came to be
seen as a relic out of time, not an integral part of modern
American society. It’s a perception that persists to this day.