About Edward S. Curtis
Edward S. Curtis
Edward Curtis was born in 1868 in rural Wisconsin. His father, Reverend Johnson Curtis, had returned from the Civil War penniless and debilitated; Curtis and his siblings grew up in poverty, with the entire family occasionally going for days or even weeks at a time subsisting solely on a diet of potatoes. Yet Reverend Curtis and his wife Ellen managed to raise a family of four children, of which Edward was the second. Before his fifth birthday, the family moved to rural Cordova, Minnesota, where his father continued his vocation as an itinerant preacher. Even though Curtis undoubtedly had some contact with American Indians while growing up in Minnesota, most traditional Indian life there had disappeared by the time he and his family arrived in the 1870s, and no specific record exists of any American Indian influence on his life at that time.
