Pictures and Profit in the Pacific Northwest

“Indian Totem Pole, Pioneer Square,” from Souvenir of Seattle (1900)

In 1888, one year before Washington became a state, a pamphlet promoting travel on the recently completed Northern Pacific Railroad observed how strange it was that “notwithstanding three thousand miles of sundering ocean,” the countries of Europe “and even the antiquities of the Land of the Pharaohs” had been easier for American tourists to visit than “the incomparable natural wonders of their own far-extending domain.” Thanks to new railroad and steamship lines, those days were gone, and the scenic wonders of the Pacific Northwest (including southeastern Alaska) were now within easy reach.

Compared to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist photos from other parts of the world, photos of the Northwest place less emphasis on people, culture, and history and more on nature’s bounty. As in Mexico, railroads in the Northwest recognized the power of photography in marketing not only their own businesses, but also the entire region to potential settlers and entrepreneurs. Many people who visited new states like Washington as tourists later moved there to enjoy its wildness and earn a living from its seemingly unlimited natural resources.

Promotional photography of the Northwest also frequently accentuates its openness and sense of being “untouched.” Even some images of cities like Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellingham contain hardly any people. More troublingly, tourist photos reinforce the false idea that Native Americans are a “dying race” and have all but disappeared from the landscape. A photo of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, for example, depicts three Natives in a way that echoes the depiction of Arabs in contemporary images of Egypt. They are tiny, distant (physically and culturally), and have done nothing to improve the land, such as bring water to the desert and cultivate it; therefore, their claims to ownership of the land—in the settler colonial mindset—are weak. (Celilo Falls, as a case in point, was a fishing site of great cultural significance for local tribes. Despite promises to respect their rights, in 1957 the federal government allowed the construction of the Dalles Dam, which destroyed the falls and a nearby Indian village.)

In another parallel with Orientalist images of the Middle East, some photographs masquerade as authentic representations of Northwest Natives but are actually contrived or even completely fictional. And rather than bringing attention to indigenous peoples’ present-day struggles and successes, they leave viewers with the feeling that the subjects are only figures of the past. Beginning in the late 1890s, Lee Moorhouse, a businessman and amateur photographer from Pendleton, Oregon, took thousands of images of local Indians. Moorhouse was a collector of Native artifacts and clothing, which he provided to sitters who came to his home studio; consequently, as documentary images their value is questionable. Like the work of his more famous contemporary Edward Curtis of Seattle, the images evoke sympathy for Native Americans but perpetuate the idea that the modern world has no place for them. Many of Moorhouse’s images became widely known through reproduction as postcards and in magazines, histories, advertisements, and tourist publications, such as his Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs (1906). A few of the album's photos depict make-believe characters or are imaginary portrayals of long-dead people such as Sacagawea, who traveled with Lewis and Clark a century earlier.

In 1890, Septima Collis, a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, set off for Alaska on one of the cruise ships that had been sailing out of Puget Sound since 1884. She was among the first tourists to own a Kodak camera. Invented two years earlier, it allowed anyone who could press a button to become a photographer. Collis quickly figured out that the Tlingit Indians of Sitka, like everyone else, knew how to turn a profit from tourism. When she pointed her camera at them, they hid their heads under blankets, but when offered a silver dollar, they allowed themselves to be “Kodaked.” Native women wore an exaggerated (and more photogenic) form of traditional dress to help them sell curios to tourists. Baskets were especially desirable. “The prices asked were exorbitant in the extreme,” Collis remarked, but the women “had a trades-union understanding among themselves” and always stuck to the price.