The story of how George Bird Grinnell supposedly met Edward S. Curtis has been told many times in books and articles. Most commonly, it begins in 1898 when Curtis was photographing scenic views on the slopes of Mount Rainer, about 40 miles southeast of Seattle. He was said to have seen a group of inexperienced hikers headed toward a potentially dangerous area of hidden crevasses, and he rushed to turn them around.
Among those who were reported by various authors to have been in the group that Curtis encountered were important scientists Gifford Pinchot, C. Hart Merriam, and George Bird Grinnell. As it has been told, that encounter led to Grinnell inviting Curtis to be the official photographer of the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. That trip would prove to be the first major turning point in Curtis’s life.
However, there is a lot of uncertainty about what actually happened. More likely, the often repeated story is a collection of separate events that occurred in different years.[1] We know now that it was Merriam, not Grinnell, who invited Curtis on the Harriman Expedition, the probable result of the two having met at some point between 1896 and 1898. According to Curtis's recollection, he did not meet Grinnell until the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, but that connection led directly or indirectly to crystallize Curtis's concept for his masterful book series, The North American Indian.
Born in 1849, George Bird Grinnell was the first of six children in the family of Helen Lansing Grinnell and George Blake Grinnell. They lived a comfortable upper-class lifestyle in Brooklyn, New York. His father was an important figure in the community, first as a noted judge, then state senator, and, eventually, U. S. representative.
Some authors claim that George was given his middle name later in life by Native Peoples because he usually appeared on their lands in the springtime, like migrating birds. However, his parents named him after his cousin once removed, George Bird. Because of his father’s prominence, Birdie, as he was often called by his eastern friends, emphasized his middle name in professional circles to distinguish himself from his father. Throughout his life, he signed most of his formal letters as “Geo. Bird Grinnell”[2]
When Grinnell was seven years old, their family moved to a fourteen-acre property purchased from Lucy Bakewell Audubon, widow of famed naturalist John James Audubon. Mr. Audubon died in 1851, and Lucy still lived on their property in what is now the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Grinnell later wrote that except for the land around the Audubon house, the property was “a tangle of underbrush and saplings, above which rose many forest trees, some of great size.”[3] He loved playing in those woods, and as he grew older, he came to appreciate the many values of relatively undisturbed land. By all accounts, Lucy was an imposing figure, and she instilled in Grinnell an early and continuing interest in natural history. Later, when he founded the Audubon Society, he said it as much for her as for her husband.[4]
The Harriman Alaska Expedition
At the end of the nineteenth century, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman was one of the richest men in the world. He had traveled extensively on the rail lines he owned throughout the western U.S., but in 1899, he decided to venture even farther west and explore Alaska. Since most of that region was still unknown to Euro-Americans, Harriman conceived of a great scientific expedition to “discover” and record details about its land, people, wildlife, and natural resources.[5]
He arranged for the expedition to be outfitted with the best accommodations imaginable. They would travel on the 250 ft. (76m) steamship George W. Elder, which was completely refitted with luxurious staterooms, a gourmet kitchen, and the latest in scientific equipment. Harriman then asked Hart Merriam to invite the country’s best scientists, including Bird Grinnell, to join the voyage. To record their sights for posterity, Merriam invited Curtis to be the official photographer for the expedition.
That experience must have been life-changing for Curtis. He had grown up with no more than a sixth-grade education, and since then, almost everything he had learned was self-taught. Suddenly, he found himself spending two months with some of the nation’s top scientists. On the expedition were eleven biologists and zoologists, five geologists and geographers, five botanists, and three naturalists, including one of the best-known men in America at that time, John Muir. The trip undoubtedly was an intensive and non-stop course in natural sciences and the research methods of that time.
Without any documentation of the interactions between Curtis and Grinnell, we are left to speculate on what they might have discussed. When he left for the Alaska trip, Curtis had been photographing some of the Coast Salish People who lived around his Puget Sound homeland for only a few years. Even so, his images were already gaining national attention. In 1898, his image “Homeward,” showing five Natives in a large dugout canoe against a dramatic sunset, won a gold medal at the National Photographer’s Convention in New York.
In contrast, Grinnell had been studying and writing about the American West for more than twenty years, and he was one of the leading voices of land and wildlife conservation in America. Between 1880 and 1911, he was the chief editor of the influential magazine Forest and Stream, published primarily for hunters but with Grinnell's conservation viewpoint. He also edited The Audubon Magazine from 1886 to 1889. In addition, he authored three books and more than a dozen articles about various aspects of Native cultures. At least in the privileged circles of white explorers of the West at that time, Grinnell was considered to be one of a new class of experts on Native customs and beliefs.
While on the Alaska trip, Grinnell is likely to have spoken with Curtis about his many years of living near and learning from Lucy Audubon. Her house was filled with John James Audubon’s work, including a copy of his most famous work, Birds of America.[6] There are some distinct similarities between Audubon’s book and what was soon to become Curtis’s equally renowned work, The North American Indian, and it is worthwhile to consider these here.
Both publications are monumental in their scope, and each was released in a limited edition over an extended period of years. Subscribers to Birds of America received five hand-colored plates at a time (one large bird, one medium-size bird, three small birds) between 1827 and 1838. A complete set of 435 plates issued in four unbound volumes cost subscribers about $1,000 (approximately $34,000 in 2024 dollars).
When Curtis began selling The North American Indian (NAI), he used a subscription model similar to Audubon’s. He initially advertised the complete twenty-volume set of his publication for $3,000 (about $105,000 in today’s dollars). Both Birds of America and NAI were sold on a pay-as-you-go subscription plan. Even so, both authors had recurring problems selling their publications due to the high costs and prolonged publication times. Perhaps Grinnell had forgotten, or at least failed to mention, a warning to Curtis about the importance of delivering promises on time. Audubon learned this lesson the hard way: in the four years it took for him to publish his first volume of plates, he lost nearly a third of his promised subscribers. Curtis suffered a similar problem over the nearly three decades it took to complete his project.
Grinnell’s “Indian” Authority
More than most other scientists and writers of his time, Grinnell offered a more empathetic viewpoint of Native Peoples. For his book The Story of the Indian (1898), he assembled a collection of tales told from a human-interest point of view rather than that of an anthropologist. In the introduction to that book, he wrote:
We are too apt to forget that these people are human like ourselves; that they are fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters; men and women with emotions and passions like our own….Not until we recognize this common humanity may we attain the broader view and the wider sympathy which shall give us a true comprehension of the character of the Indian.[7]
Just four months prior to leaving on the Alaska trip, Grinnell sounded a more somber note in a long article entitled “The Wild Indian.” In it, he described many of the conditions facing the Native Peoples of that time:
The wild Indian exists no longer. The game on which he lived has been destroyed; the country over which he roamed has been taken up; and his tribes, one by one, have been compelled to settle down within the narrow confines of reservations. This change, by which an entire race has been called to give over the ways of wanderers, and to adapt itself to the life of people of fixed abodes, is most momentous.[8]
It is interesting to note that by the start of the 1890s, Grinnell began to equate the word “wild” with “picturesque.” a term (or at least a concept) frequently used later by Curtis. Grinnell had seen the increasing effects of overhunting on bison and wild birds, and he used his position as editor of Field and Stream to begin to promote “hunting” with a camera instead of a gun. In a prominent article in his magazine, he wrote about what today we would call a nature photographer:
The eagle on his craggy perch, the high hole on his hollow tree, are as legitimate game for him as the deer and grouse. All things beautiful and wild and picturesque are his, yet he kills them not, but makes them living and enduring joy, to himself and all who behold them.[9]
Grinnell seemed to use this same conflation of “wild” and “picturesque” in his descriptions of Natives who did not display obvious signs of Western influences. Writing in 1889, Grinnell opined that “Within the last twenty years the Indian has changed, and it may be doubted whether the change is altogether for the better. He has lost his picturesqueness and has become commonplace….”[10] He later repeated this same observation, writing, “At the present day, his [the Indian’s] picturesqueness has wholly disappeared, and to the common eye he has become unutterably commonplace. Yet when he lived his natural life, he and everything about him were picturesque.”[11].
In The North American Indian, Curtis used the specific term “picturesque” twenty times, although he wrote somewhat comparable words much more frequently. Among his descriptions of various Native individuals and locales, he used the word “beautiful” 121 times, “handsome” 71 times, “pretty” 62 times, “pleasing” 17 times, and “pleasant” 16 times.[12] Not surprisingly, most of these uses were in the volumes written before 1910 when it was still possible to find elders and others among Native Peoples who still retained their traditional clothing or knowledge. By instilling this kind of romantic vision in his writings, Curtis directly echoed the sentiments of his colleague Grinnell.
A year after returning from the Harriman Expedition, Grinnell published one of his most important books, The Indians of To-Day. The book’s subtitle noted it was “Illustrated with Full-Page Portraits of Living Indians.” In fact, it contained 55 photographs created by Adolph Muhr while at the 1898 Indian Congress in Omaha, Nebraska. Muhr was working for photographer Frank Rinehart at the time, and, in keeping with the accepted photographer standards of that time, Rinehart received all the credit for the images. Grinnell’s selection of Rinehart/Muhr to illustrate his book must have caught Curtis’s attention, for when he finally received major funding for The North American Indian project in 1906, Curtis asked Muhr to be his Seattle studio and darkroom manager. From then until his untimely death in 1913, Muhr was in charge of producing the darkroom magic that gave Curtis’s images such a distinctive look.
Another way that Grinnell might have influenced Curtis was through the use of a Graphophone cylinder recorder. Grinnell lugged this early sound recording device around Montana to record more than one hundred songs of the Northern Cheyenne and the Blackfeet. This is the same device and recording technique that Curtis would use throughout the fieldwork for The North American Indian. He is said to have made as many as 10,000 recordings, although most are just a few minutes long. Due to the fragile nature of the wax cylinders on which the sound was recorded, very few have survived. The largest intact collection is at the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.[13]
Grinnell’s Promotion of Curtis’s Work
In addition to his mentoring of Curtis, Grinnell personally boosted the photographer’s reputation twice in important national publications. Soon after Harriman and his entourage returned from Alaska, Grinnell authored a detailed, fourteen-part series about the expedition in Field and Stream. To illustrate his text, he included 20 photos created by Curtis during their travels. This introduced Curtis to a wider range of scientists and other influential readers across the country.
In 1905, Grinnell wrote a long article for Scribner’s Magazine titled “Portraits of Indian Types.” He concluded it with a page-and-a-half of lavish praise for Curtis, as well as 12 Curtis photographs of Native Peoples, including his now famous Cañon de Chelly, Chief Joseph, Mosa, and Son of the Desert. Grinnell wrote:
These photographs are not like those anyone has seen. The results which Curtis gets with camera stir one as one is stirred by a great painting; and when we are thus moved by a picture, and share the thought and feeling that the artist had when he made the picture, we may recognize as a work of art. These pictures show not what an ordinary photographer obtained, for Curtis is an artist. In his pictures are found that indescribable quality we term feeling, and which moves us; though how or why we cannot explain.[14]
Due to the lack of documentation, it is difficult to precisely describe the importance of George Bird Grinnell's influence on Edward S. Curtis. However, as shown above, the indirect record of their interactions points to a very important relationship, especially for Curtis. More than anyone else in the early years of Curtis's career, George Bird Grinnell stands out as a seminal figure who helped shape the concept behind The North American Indian.
Notes
[1] Tim Greyhavens, “Reconsidering Edwards S. Curtis’s Encounter with Scientists on Mount Rainier,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 100:3, Summer 2019, 107-120.
[2] John Taliaferro, Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, New York: Liveright Publishing, 2019, 19.
[3] George Bird Grinnell, “Audubon Park,” The Auk, 37:3 (July 1920), 373-374.
[4] John F. Reiger (ed.), The Passing of the Great West: Selected Papers of George Bird Grinnell. New York: Winchester Press, 1972, 22.
[7] The Story of the Indian, New York, 1898, x.
[8] “The Wild Indian,” Atlantic Monthly, 83:495, January 1899, 20.
[9] George Bird Grinnell, “Shooting without a Gun,” Field and Stream, 39, October 6, 1892, 287.
[10] George Bird Grinnell, “The North American Indian of To-Day,” Cosmopolitan Magazine, 26:5, March 1899, 537-548.
[11] George Bird Grinnell, “Portraits of Indian Types,” Scribner's Magazine, 37:3, March 1905, 259.
[12] For a detailed analysis of the descriptive language that Curtis used throughout the books, see Herman Cohen Stuart, Unraveling Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.
[13] In September 1897, Grinnell used a Graphophone cylinder recorder with a forty-inch horn to record more than one hundred songs of the Northern Cheyenne and the Blackfeet in Montana.This is the same device and recording technique that Curtis would use throughout the fieldwork for The North American Indian. "Curtis North American Indian Collection," Indiana University Libraries, https://libraries.indiana.edu/curtis-north-american-indian-collection
[14] George Bird Grinnell, “Portraits of Indian Types,” Scribner's Magazine, 37:3, March 1905, 273.