Chief Leschi

Curtis is recognized as one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. He devoted more than thirty years of his life to photographing and documenting over eighty Native American tribes west of the Mississippi. Chief Leschi was the descendant of a prominent Nisqually tribe leader of the same name from the Puget Sound region of Washington who was executed in 1854 by the U.S. Army for objecting to the reservation land assigned through the Treaty of Medicine Creek. Despite Curtis’s intention to capture and preserve aspects of Native American life, the romanticized presentation of his subjects did much to perpetuate the patronizing concept of the “noble savage” among the European-American public.