Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America's finest photographers and ethnologists and invented gold and silver processes, which later became known as 'goldtones' and 'silver tints'. Beginning in 1896 and ending in 1930, Curtis photographed and documented every major Native American tribe west of the Mississippi, taking over 40,000 negatives of eighty tribes. For thirty years, he devoted his life to an odyssey of photographing and documenting the lives and traditions of the Native people of North America. His photographs had an immense impact on the national imagination and continue to shape the way we see Native life and culture.

The principal chief of the Qagyuhl is depicted in a “button blanket” (which is simply a woollen blanket ornamented with hundreds of large mother-of-pearl buttons), cedar-bark neck-ring, and cedar-bark head-band. His right hand grasps a shaman’s rattle, and his left the carved staff which, as a kind of emblem of office, a man always holds when making a speech.