“Persistence is firmly sticking to something for a prolonged period of time, even as you encounter things that try to unstick you.”          Peter Hollins

April 1896 – Seattle, Washington: Edward Curtis, a photographer, saw the old Indian as she dug for clams on the shore of Puget Sound. He wanted to take her photograph and pointed to his camera. She shook her head no. He fumbled in his pocket for a coin, a silver dollar. He called the picture The Clam Digger. Curtis, 28, had made the first and last photo of 80-year-old Princess Angeline, the last Indian in Seattle. His life would never be the same.

While in his teens, Curtis built his first camera using a camera lens his father brought home from the Civil War and instructions he found in a book. He saved his money and in 1888 bought his first Kodak camera. He taught himself photography and with a partner started a small studio in Seattle. They did the finest photographic work in town.

Princess Angeline, the daughter of a Duwamish Indian Chief died a month after Curtis took her picture. Her story and Curtis’ iconic picture made news across the country. The event stirred the young picture-taker. Long bothered by the plight of Native Americans, whose population had fallen from 10 million a century earlier to 237,196 in the 1900 census, he decided to photograph the vanishing Indian tribes in North America. It was an insanely ambitious goal. Curtis estimated his 20-volume set of American Indian photographs would take five years to complete.

He hired a manager for his photography business and used shop profits to fund his endeavor. He devoted five years to photographing Northwest tribes including the Kwakiutl, Salish, Chinookan, Tlingit, Haida, and Suquamish. Convincing Indians to have their pictures taken was often difficult. Many were suspicious of ‘the white man with magic box who catch shadows.’ He carried a pocket of silver dollars.

Curtis, the Shadow Catcher, as he would come to be known, was almost broke. He needed more money and more people to help him. He boarded a train east and made presentations from Carnegie Hall to the White House before convincing America’s richest man, New York banker J.P. Morgan, to commit $15,000 yearly for five years. In return, Morgan was to receive a 20-volume set of books comprising 1500 pictures and critical information about each tribe.

Over the years, the Shadow Catcher’s journey took him to the Southwest to photograph the Acoma, Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Maricopa, Mohave, Pima, Yuma, Zuni, among other tribes. He spent years crisscrossing the Great Plains to capture pictures of Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Crow. He eventually wound up his adventure with photos of various groups of Alaskan Eskimos.

Curtis devoted 33 years of his life to capturing the history of the vanishing North American Indians. He lugged his 14” x 17”, eight-pound camera across the continent. Working 16-hour days, seven days a week, he took more than 40,000 photos of more than 80 Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River. He never took a salary for his work and was continually raising funds for the next trip. Twice, he was given up for dead. Often broke and sometimes sick and depressed, the work and the loneliness took their toll on him. Curtis stopped for two years at one point but returned to finish what he had started.

In September 1929, 61-year-old Edward Curtis finished Volume 20 of The North American Indian photography collection. The work also included wax cylinders on which his small crew collected more than 10,000 recordings of songs, music, and dialogue from the more than 80 tribes. A few weeks later, the stock market crashed. When the 20-volume set was printed in 1930, Americans were more focused on surviving than looking at pictures of Indians. Only 220 sets were sold.

“When I finished the final volume,” Curtis recalled, “I didn’t have the money to buy a ham sandwich to celebrate. But I was duty bound to finish the project with or without money.” Almost 100 years later, Curtis’ masterpiece The North American Indian is the largest photographic project in American history. The original prints can be found in the Library of Congress and the 20-volume set can be viewed online.