- Edward S. Curtis is famed for his artistic documentation of the faces and lives of indigenous peoples in his epic 20-volume work, "The North American Indian."

Though some of his techniques are controversial today, he created an indelible record in sepia prints.

His work is well-known, the prints are highly collectible, and many of the images are considered iconic.

But Edward Curtis wasn't the only Curtis to leave an extraordinary photographic legacy.

It was as if creative lightning had struck twice in the same family, two men of incredible energy.

(playful music) Their own portraits are revealing.

Edward is now considered an artist, a romantic, a man who is trying to record the beauty of a so-called vanishing race.

He looks like a turn-of-the-century bohemian.

His brother Asahel had a different style, he looked more like a bank clerk or an accountant.

But he and his studio snapped an almost encyclopedic view of a region growing from a frontier wilderness into modernity.

His images were artful but they didn't romanticize.

It's Asahel Curtis's legacy that we turn to for images of ourselves as settlers, builders, lovers of nature and destroyers of the same, for gold, timber, transportation and commerce.

If Edward's images spoke to what was here before whites came, Asahel's captured what came after.

Asahel Curtis and his older brother Edward were introduced to photography in their teens, in their native Minnesota.

In 1887, Edward and his father moved to Puget Sound to homestead with the rest of the family, including 14 year old Asahel following the next year.

Young Edward tired of farming and gave it up to pursue professional photography and set up a studio in Seattle.

It was a success.

In 1894, he hired young Asahel as his apprentice.

A few years later with gold strikes in the Yukon, Asahel went to the Klondike to document the ensuing gold rush in places like Skagway and Dawson, and the trails the prospectors followed.

It was not an easy job.

In addition to hauling supplies needed to sustain in the frigid wilds, it required transporting large glass-plate negatives for taking pictures, bulky box cameras, photo chemicals, and shooting in freezing conditions.

Edward, seeing the opportunity to bring the gold rush to a national audience, wrote an article illustrated with pictures for the Century Magazine.

A story that created a sensation for the hardships and realism it portrayed.

The magazine credited Edward with the pictures and he accepted credit because Asahel worked for his studio.

But he also expressly claimed to the editors that he had trod the snowy trails and taking them personally when he had not, they were Asahel's photographs.

His brother was in rage for Edwards taking credit.

After a blowup, Asahel quit Edward's studio, and the two remained estranged for the rest of their lives.

Creatively too, they went their separate ways.

Asahel went on to create the images that form the bedrock of contemporary regional identity.

(bright music) He photographed the natural world of the old-growth forest of the Olympic peninsula, the mountains, glaciers, and the new class of men and women who were recreational adventurers like the mountaineers, a group of which he was a founder.

He also unapologetically recorded the exploitation of that environment.

The loggers, the railroads, the heavy work of turning a wilderness into cities and ships.

And he wasn't just documenting the growing and changing region, he was a booster, a promoter of growth and development.

His livelihood as a commercial photographer relied on him, yet he also advocated to save some wilderness in national parks like Mount Rainier, though he fought hard to limit the size of Olympic National Park, so that those who made a living from the resource economy would not be negatively impacted.

The city he focused on most was Seattle.

From the booming settlement of the late 19th century to the modern city of the mid 20th, it was then that Seattle transformed from a frontier boomtown, and remade itself with regrades of the landscape to spur development.

It was a city amidst transportation change too.

Horses yielded to trolley lines, to automobiles, to aircraft.

He took images of the post frontier inhabitants ranging from high school students to hospital nurses, catching dignitaries and foreigners that visited.

Picking out newsboys, and suffragists, Japanese dancers.

He also photographed native peoples picking in the hub fields, or the Makah of Neah Bay hunting whales.

Along with the natural beauty, he also photograph the ideal of the future city presented in the design of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition of 1909.

We might argue today over what that perfection is.

(kind orchestral music) But it's safe to say that while Asahel recorded the Northwest for half a century, from the 1890s to his death in his studio in 1941, he also worked to drive its growth as steadily as any pioneer.

His tool wasn't a plow or a combine, it was a camera.

Asahel's images didn't just record us, they actively shaped and defined us as no other photographer's work had.

After his death, a nature trail along I-90 was named for Asahel Curtis.

It seems fitting, the sound of a highway can be heard along with the roar of the gushing humpback creek, amid cascade old-growth Tim.

His ashes were in turn here, that is until the 1962 Columbus Day storm smashed his monument and scattered them to the winds.

Asahel tried to capture a present that wanted to have it both ways, parks and highways, mountains and coal mines.

A place that sustained farmers, loggers, city dwellers, tourists and millions of more people without ultimate cost to nature and wild lands.

His photographs are more than just snapshots of the past, they embody the contradictions and dilemmas we still live with today.

(uplifting orchestral music) - [Announcer] Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Bedrooms & More.