The Lure of Gold.

The Lure of Gold was the last great project of Edward S. Curtis, the photographer and ethnologist celebrated for his monumental twenty-volume work The North American Indian. In 1949 and 1950, having largely set aside the Indian work that had consumed his life, Curtis labored furiously on this unpublished manuscript. As his biographer Timothy Egan records, "The walls of his tiny apartment were plastered with notes in his unreadable scratch. I'm busy with The Lure of Gold, he wrote Harriet Leitch in October, brushing off a fresh round of questions from her about his Indian work" (Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, page 311). Curtis envisioned a sweeping work documenting two hundred years of the history of gold, and hoped that year to organize a gold-mining and scientific expedition to Brazil, the Amazon, and the Andes. The present manuscript reads like an introductory chapter or prospectus, considering the importance of gold in human cultures from ancient Egypt to the Klondike, and drawing on Curtis's own experiences mining for gold in California, Oregon, and Alaska. It opens, "What implanted in the brain of man the covetous desire for gold? Gold! Gold! The name in many languages of the globe comes down to us from the dawn of time," and concludes with a group of rainbow chasers agreeing that heaven should be "like Northern California and Southern Oregon, where we have wooded mountains, moderate temperature and cool flowing streams." Edward S. Curtis (1868 to 1952) spent more than thirty years photographing the native peoples of North America, producing some of the most enduring images in the history of American photography.