Another photographer of Indians during this period was Roland Reed. He was bom in 1864 in Wisconsin, less than one hundred miles from Curtis' birthplace. In 1890, Reed headed West to make his fortune. He began his career making sketches of the Indians along the Great Northern Railroad. Many of his portraits were of the Blackfeet living along the Missouri River. Dissatisfied with his artwork, Reed wrote about photography: 'If I could master this seemingly easy way of making pictures, I would have no trouble in getting all the Indian pictures I wanted.'
In 1893, Reed joined the studio of Daniel Dutro in Havre, Montana. He and Dutro worked together for several years, taking Indian portraits which they sold to the railroad news department for use in publicity material to attract passengers to the West. Reed left Dutro to join the Associated Press news service in Seattle. He ventured north to photograph the Alaskan gold rush and the native populations. He found what remained totally uninspiring.
In 1900, Reed settled in Bemidji, Minnesota. He used his studio portrait photography to finance his field trips among the local Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indians. At first, he had difficulty in obtaining pictures. Their leader. King Bird, threw him out of the Red Lake village. Finally, at the Cross Lake Indian School, he had success. Like James Mooney before him, Reed used a photograph to gain an entrance. Patiently waiting for several days at Ponemah village, Reed answered the request of two small girls to photograph their sick brother. When Reed returned to the village several months later with the print in hand, the father of the sick boy asked to see the picture. He turned his back, walked away and stood staring at the image for some time. Finally, he asked Reed what the photograph cost. Reed inquired after the boy. He learned then that the child had died. He told the father how glad he was that he had made the picture and gave it to him. Reed remembered: 'That fine, old man gave me his hand, and from that time on, I was welcomed.'
By 1907, Reed has gained enough fame and fortune to close his studio and concentrate entirely on making a photographic record of Indian life. In 1915, he and fiction writer James Willard Schultz created an Illustrated book entitled Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park. They took a group of Indians, with costumes and studio paraphernalia, into the romantic setting of the Park. The Blackfeet had never lived there, but they and the imagemakers recreated the stories and photographs as if they were true (plates 9.12-9.16).
Reed was not a prolific photographer. He viewed his work with North American Indians as an art form which took patient years of refinement to produce the few pictures he wanted to create. Reed did not sell his pictures commercially and even turned down an offer from an advertiser of $15,000 for 200 of his negatives. The only publication rights he granted were to the National Geographic Magazine. On his death in 1934, a collection of about seventy negatives of Chippewa, Cheyenne and Blackfeet Indians was inherited by a cousin, Roy E. Williams, who used them in lectures to school children about Indians.''
World History
