Edward Sheriff Curtis was born in 1868 in Wisconsin, and at the age of 19 moved to the Puget Sound. After constructing his own camera he began photographing the Native Americans of the Washington state waterfront. He went on to photograph on a major expedition with naturalist John Muir and ornithologist John Burroughs. On this trip he photographed his first major series of Native Americans. George Bird Grinell, the editor of Forest & Stream magazine, had Curtis spend a season with the Piegan and Blackfoot tribes of northern Montana, and Curtis began to realize he was viewing the passing of a great race and set himself to the task of preserving it through photographic documentation, and ethnological notes.

This process began in 1897 with his first exhibit in 1904. The first nine years of his work were self-financed until he met President Theodore Roosevelt who introduced him to J.P. Morgan. All told Morgan and his estate contributed half of the total $1,500,000 cost of Curtis' life work. Curtis focused on the Native Americans west of the Mississippi beginning in the southwest with the Apache, Jicarilla, and Navajo. He tried to participate in the daily life of the tribes he photographed, and in 1922 he became a Snake Priest in the Hopi Snake Ceremony.

Curtis and his assistant W.E. Myers documented over 10,000 native songs as well as biographical studies such as Crow Bull Chief's tracing Crow history through ten chiefs. He studied the Little Big Horn Battlefield with three Crow scouts who guided Custer's command and interviewed Sioux participants about their memories of the battle. What became a thirty year project and included the study of over eighty tribes, yielded 40,000 photographs, a twenty volume set of books with 500 editions entitled "The North American Indian" each with 300 pages and a total of 1500 photogravure prints. Each volume also had an accompanying portfolio of 36 or more copperplate photogravures totaling 722 plates.

Curtis died in 1952 at the age of 84 with little acclaim and nearly penniless, but he succeeded in capturing images of a way of life drastically changing by the time he completed his work in the 1930's.

Four Winds Gallery is lucky to still have in it's collection two goldtones, over 60 signed original platinum prints, over 100 portfolio gravures and over 100 volume gravures. Please see our web site for information or contact us.

We wanted to take a moment to explain a term that appears quite a bit on our web site for those of you who aren't jewelry makers or sellers. The term is repousse, (pronounced rupoosay). It is the process or the product of ornamenting metal with designs in relief pushed or hammered out from the back. The metal is pushed but, its thickness remains the same. The process is of ancient origin, having been employed by most early civilizations. Above is repousse work done by Cody Sanderson. Cody often stamps the outline of the raised area and darkens it as well. Visit our web site for more examples by artists such as Thomas Curtis, Alex Sanchez and Harry Begay.

The Zuni Knife-wing figure was a favorite among tourists during the early 1900's. As described by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, who lived with the Zunis from 1879-1884:
"This curious god is the hero of hundreds of folklore tales, the tutelary deity of several societies of Zuni. He is represented as possessing a human form, furnished with flint knife-feathered pinions, and tail. His dress consists of the conventional terraced cap (representative of his dwelling place among the clouds)... His weapons are the Great Flint-Knife of War, the Bow of the Skies (the Rainbow), and the Arrow of Lightning. His guardians or warriors are the Great Mountain Lion of the North and that of the upper regions. He was doubtless the original War God of the Zunis."
Zuni silversmith Horace Iule is credited with creating the first knife-wing design in the late 1920s. His first one was cut and filed out of wrought silver. Loved by Indian traders, they asked him to make more. Later, the knife-wing became one of the first designs that the Zuni jewelry artists inlaid with stones.