Cañon de Chelly—Navaho (1904)

The place

Canyon de Chelly is a system of deep sandstone canyons in northeastern Arizona. Curtis's own caption, written for the 1907 portfolio, calls it a wonderfully scenic spot "in the heart of the Navaho country" and "one of their strongholds," and notes the ruins of earlier villages perched in niches along its walls. Elsewhere in the first volume he described it as the garden spot of the reservation, with small farms and peach orchards watered by seasonal floods.

Those ruins belong to an older story. According to the National Park Service, Ancestral Puebloan people built pit houses and later alcove dwellings in the canyons and lived there until the mid-1300s, and the archaeological record spans more than 4,000 years. Canyon de Chelly National Monument was authorized in 1931. Its roughly 84,000 acres lie on Navajo Nation land and are managed in partnership by the Park Service and the Navajo Nation, and about 40 Navajo families still live, farm and raise livestock inside the park boundaries.

What the photograph shows

The picture is built on a simple contrast of scale. On the left, a towering cliff face fills nearly half the frame, its base lit and its upper wall in shadow. To the right the canyon opens out toward lower, distant walls under a pale sky. Across the flat, bright floor of the canyon move seven riders, four in one group and three in another, with a small dog trotting between them. They are tiny against the rock, and seen in silhouette.

The riders are not named in Curtis's caption or in the Library of Congress record, which describes them only as seven Native riders on horseback with a dog. The caption is about the canyon, not about them: in this picture people are presented as part of a place rather than as individuals.

How it was made and published

Curtis copyrighted the image in 1904, early in the fieldwork that became The North American Indian, and gave the negative his number 1013. When the first volume was published in 1907, the photograph appeared in the accompanying portfolio as plate 28 under the title Cañon de Chelly—Navaho. The portfolio plates were large photogravures, an ink printing process that gave Curtis's images their warm, velvety tones. Museum impressions of plate 28, such as the one at the Cincinnati Art Museum, are printed on sheets about 34 by 43 centimeters.

The Library of Congress also holds photographic prints that Curtis deposited when registering copyrights. The print in this archive is one of those, made from the negative rather than from the gravure plate, and it is the same composition as the published plate 28.

Why it became famous

Part of the appeal is purely visual: the sweep of the cliff, the clean horizon of the canyon floor and the small procession crossing it make the picture legible at any size. The literary scholar Mick Gidley, writing about the project for the Library of Congress, points to a subtler choice. Curtis keeps the riders' heads below the horizon line, so that for all the canyon's harsh grandeur the composition presents it as home to the Navajo people crossing it, rather than as an empty wilderness.

The picture has also been read more critically. Curtis's work as a whole, as later scholars have stressed, favored timeless scenes over the realities of reservation life in the early 1900s. Canyon de Chelly is a real place and the riders were real people traveling through it, but the photograph, like the caption with its stress on vanished villages, frames the canyon as a stage for an older way of life rather than as a community with a present and a future.

What to look for

Start with the light. The sun strikes the foot of the great wall and the canyon floor, leaving the upper cliff and the right-hand walls in softer shadow, which pushes the eye down to the riders. Then count the figures: four riders close together on the left, a dog, and three more riders farther right, all moving in the same direction. Notice how small the gap is between the riders and the base of the cliff, and how much empty, sunlit sand lies in front of them.

In this print the lower left corner carries the handwritten copyright line, "Copyright 1904 By E.S. Curtis," with the negative number 1013 beneath it. The same number appears in the Library's catalog record, which is how this print can be matched to the published plate.

The version in this archive

This archive's image is the Library of Congress photographic print catalogued under the title [Navajo riders in Canyon de Chelly], a title devised by Library staff. Its record notes Curtis negative no. 1013, a 1904 copyright, a U.S. Copyright Office deposit number, and publication in The North American Indian, Portfolio I, plate 28, confirming that it is the famous image rather than a related view. The archive also holds other Curtis photographs made in the canyon system, including views of Cañon del Muerto, but those are separate pictures.