Many biographers have written about Edward S. Curtis’s life and his creation of twenty volumes of text and twenty portfolios of photogravures that comprise The North American Indian. This monumental project began in 1907 and was completed in 1930. However, no study has focused solely on the publication, sales, and ultimate fates of The North American Indian books and portfolios, and there is no consensus in the literature about how many sets Curtis originally published.

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Our research and the subsequent publication of our findings are intended to remedy that deficiency and to answer two basic questions:

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• How many sets of The North American Indian were originally published?

• How many sets of The North American Indian still exist today? 

 

For the past eight years, the Curtis Census editorial team has tracked down every known copy of the books and portfolios to tell the full story of this remarkable publication. It has been a challenging task that evolved from a simple enumeration of known sets into a multi-layered database of people, places, activities, and timelines. It was no simple feat, but we are confident that we have answered these and other perplexing questions.

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This work, at its core, comprises a record of every set we have been able to document, as well as those we believe were never published and whose existence cannot be confirmed. We also identify all sets that have been broken apart through auctions and sales, those whose location we cannot determine, and those that have been destroyed. The study incorporates both internationally and domestically held sets. All 500 set numbers are accounted for in this census, although many of those were never used.

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The Census is the work of a team of highly knowledgeable and very dedicated volunteers. Each person has contributed more than a thousand hours of research online and through in-person reviews of dozens of sets of The North American Indian. Here is our team:

Tim Greyhavens, a Seattle author, historical researcher, and photographer, began this project in November 2017. He shares the work of this census with two other editors, Judith Hayner and Janet Steins, who both joined the project in 2018. Greyhavens has most recently published the first comprehensive exploration of nineteenth-century photography in Washington State, Artistic and Life-Like: Photography in Washington, 1850-1900. He regularly writes essays about Curtis and other early photographers for scholarly publications and social media.
 

Judith Hayner is the former Executive Director of the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan. Hackley Public Library, located next door to the Muskegon Museum of Art, was built in 1888 and began a subscription to Curtis’s The North American Indian in 1908 (Set 70), making it one of the earliest subscribers. In 2014, this set, Set 70, was gifted to the Muskegon Museum of Art. In honor of that history and gift, in 2017, the museum exhibited all 723 photogravures from the portfolios of set 70 of The North American Indian, which was the first time all photogravures and volumes were exhibited at the same time.
 

Janet Steins is the former Collections Librarian of the Tozzer Library at Harvard University. Founded in 1866 as the Library of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, it is the oldest library in the United States specializing in all subfields of anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. The Tozzer Library holds the complete Set 44 of The North American Indian. Janet has a wealth of bibliographic and archival management knowledge, which has been especially useful to the census project as we research the provenance of each known set.