Curtis’s Big Dream

Hers is a simple, worn face; mouth and eyes downturned—in sadness, in waiting, in remembrance? That humble portrait of an old woman—Princess Angeline in Seattle, Washington, 1895—launched a nearly 40-year career unparalleled in its importance to the American West. She was the subject of Edward Sheriff Curtis’s first photograph, which would become a part of an American treasure that documented the vanishing life of the North American Indian. His collection of 40,000 to 50,000 negative