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Big Knife - Flathead, plate 230 from the portfolio The North American Indian, volume 7, The Yakima. The Klickitat. Salishan tribes of the interior. The Kutenai.

A photogravure of the 1910 copyright photo by E. S. Curtis, made by John Andrew and Son

Big Knife – Flathead, Photogravure. Curtis Caption: "Big Knife's ancestry includes an Iroquois (perhaps a halfbreed), one of a number who came into the Northwest as employes of the Hudson's Bay Company. The head-dress of buffalo horns and scalp is not characteristic of the Salish tribes, but of the plains Indians."

 Framed Size: 28" x 32". 

Custom framed in a gorgeous bird's-eye maple frame with an inlaid wood strip circling the perimeter. The frame is in excellent condition with one very, very tiny chip on the underside bottom corner, see photo. Visible surfaces pristine. The piece is matted with a single mat. The mat opening is 11-5/8" x 16-3/4". An accent strip of 1/8" hand-marbled paper borders the mat edge and is an excellent compliment to the photo and frame. Two tiny scuff marks appear on the glass which are barely noticeable. See photo.

Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) was a professional photographer known for his images of Native Americans and of the American West. Born in Wisconsin, Curtis moved with his family to Cordova, Minnesota, shortly after his brother's birth in 1874. In 1887, Curtis moved again with his father to Seattle in the Washington Territory, where he built partnerships with several area photographers. Around 1895 Curtis began to photograph American Indians in the Seattle area. He joined the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska as the expedition's official photographer and spent the summer of 1900 with George Bird Grinnell on a trip to document the Sun Dance on the Piegan Reservation in Montana. These experiences fueled Curtis' interest in American Indians and their culture and he set out to document every North American tribe before they "vanished." These photographs became the basis for his twenty volume "The North American Indian," a set of books which combined ethnographic descriptions and high-quality photogravures.

 Beginning in 1900 and continuing over the next thirty years, Edward Sheriff Curtis, or the “Shadow Catcher” as he was later called by some of the tribes, took over 40,000 images and recorded rare ethnographic information from over eighty American Indian tribal groups, ranging from the Eskimo or Inuit people of the far north to the Hopi people of the Southwest. He captured the likeness of many important and well-known Indian people of that time, including Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Medicine Crow and others. This monumental accomplishment is comprised of more than 2,200 sepia toned photogravures bound in twenty volumes of written information and small images and twenty portfolios of larger artistic representations. In 1906 Curtis approached JP Morgan for financial assistance, and Morgan agreed to advance Curtis $75,000 to launch what was soon heralded as "the most gigantic undertaking since the King James version of the Bible.” Today, fine examples of those sets of rare books, which never would have been created but for Morgan's faith and commitment, can sell for nearly $3 million. Over the next two decades Morgan and his heirs ultimately contributed $400,000 to the production of Curtis's magnum opus, The North American Indian. In today's dollars this would translate into $10 million based on the Consumer Price Index. An extraordinary commitment to the world of art, rare books and to the preservation of a record of a people and a culture which otherwise would have been lost forever. Morgan once said: "I like a man who attempts the impossible."

Curtis became impassioned by his dream to preserve a written, oral, and visual record of Native peoples and their way of life before it was lost forever; a struggle which continues today in the United States and throughout the world. Today, Curtis's photographs, writing, film footage, and wax cylinder recordings of language and music are frequently used by Native people for critical cultural and linguistic revivification.

Curtis sacrificed everything in the pursuit of his dream. He was never even able to draw a salary from the 30-year project that defined his life. In fact, after recovering from a two-year hospitalization at the end of the project, he lived out the rest of his life in obscurity and financially dependent on his daughter and son-in-law.