The Vanishing Race—Navaho (1904)

Curtis's own explanation

Few photographs come with so explicit a statement of intent. In the caption for plate 1 of the first portfolio, Curtis wrote: "The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of a unknown future." He added that because the picture expressed so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, he had chosen it as the first of the series.

The image therefore works as a kind of title page for The North American Indian, the twenty-volume publication issued between 1907 and 1930. The scholar Mick Gidley calls it the keynote picture of the whole project.

What the photograph shows

A column of riders on horseback moves away from the viewer along a track, heading toward a dark wall of cliffs. Their backs are to the camera and their faces are mostly hidden; Gidley describes the scene as some Navajos entering a canyon, with one head turned to look back. The foreground is in deep shadow, and the only strong light falls on the path ahead and the sky over the canyon rim, so the riders seem to move out of the light rather than toward it.

The riders are not named in Curtis's caption or in the Library of Congress records. The Library describes the image simply as Navajos on horseback riding away from the photographer.

The myth behind the title

The idea that Native Americans were a vanishing race was widespread when Curtis made this picture. In an essay written for the Library of Congress, the historian David R. M. Beck explains that it drew on the belief that the frontier had closed and on Social Darwinist theories of competing races, and that it was reinforced by catastrophic population loss from war and disease and by the federal policy of forced assimilation pursued from the late 1880s to the mid-1930s. Wild West shows, world's fairs, museums and advertising all repeated the theme.

Beck's conclusion is that Native nations did not vanish, as peoples or as political communities, and that Curtis's photographs helped keep the myth alive in American culture. The writer Gerald Vizenor, also writing for the Library, describes the picture as a column of natives lost in the shadows, a sentimental evanescence, and stresses that Curtis composed it as an image of absence at a time when Native people were very much present, as teachers and doctors as well as on reservations; he names Luther Standing Bear and Charles Eastman.

Why it became famous

Its fame comes from its position and its clarity. As the first plate in the first portfolio, it was the image every subscriber saw before any other, and its message needs no caption. It has since become the picture most often used to sum up Curtis's project, both by admirers who see it as a lament and by critics who see it as a statement of a mistaken, and convenient, belief. Gidley notes that Curtis's views were contradictory: he could judge Native cultures harshly, support assimilation, and at the same time mourn what he thought was being lost, and later in life he wrote with real anger about government policy.

What to look for

Follow the path. It runs from the lower edge of the frame toward the cliffs, and the riders strung along it grow smaller and fainter as they go, until the last figures almost merge with the shadow. Look for the rider whose head is turned back toward the camera, the detail Gidley singles out, and for the horse partly cut off at the left edge, which makes the column feel as if it continues beyond the frame.

Then look at where the light is. The brightest areas are the strip of sky above the canyon wall and the sunlit ground beside the trail ahead; the riders themselves are mostly in silhouette. Curtis did not need to show faces, clothing or individual people to make his point, and that absence is itself part of what critics object to: the people in the picture become a symbol rather than a community with names and a future.

The versions in this archive

This archive holds two Library of Congress versions of the image. The main one is a platinum print, toned sepia, measuring 6 1/4 by 8 inches, with the notation "Copyright 1904 by E.S. Curtis, x984" in the lower left corner; it came to the Library in 1934 with the collection of the poet Louise Imogen Guiney.

The second is the photogravure published as plate 1 of Portfolio I, produced in Boston by John Andrew & Son. Comparing the two shows the same negative in two different printing processes, one a photograph and one an ink print.