_In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose
pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has far more
than mere accuracy, because it is truthful. All serious students are to be
congratulated because he is putting his work in permanent form; for our
generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis has done. The
Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life
has been lived under conditions thru which our own race past so many ages
ago that not a vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable
calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions were not kept.
No one man alone could preserve such a record in complete form. Others
have worked in the past, and are working in the present, to preserve parts
of the record; but Mr. Curtis, because of the singular combination of
qualities with which he has been blest, and because of his extraordinary
success in making and using his opportunities, has been able to do what no
other man ever has done; what, as far as we can see, no other man could
do. He is an artist who works out of doors and not in the closet. He is a
close observer, whose qualities of mind and body fit him to make his
observations out in the field, surrounded by the wild life he
commemorates. He has lived on intimate terms with many different tribes of
the mountains and the plains. He knows them as they hunt, as they travel,
as they go about their various avocations on the march and in the camp. He
knows their medicine men and sorcerers, their chiefs and warriors, their
young men and maidens. He has not only seen their vigorous outward
existence, but has caught glimpses, such as few white men ever catch, into
that strange spiritual and mental life of theirs; from whose innermost
recesses all white men are forever barred. Mr. Curtis in publishing this
book is rendering a real and great service; a service not only to our own
people, but to the world of scholarship everywhere._