Edward S. Curtis was born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin and ended his formal education with the sixth grade. Soon thereafter he built his own camera and taught himself to expose and develop film and to make photographic prints. By age seventeen, Edward was working as an apprentice photographer in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1898 a chance event radically altered the direction of Curtis' life. During an extended season spent photographing on Mount Rainier, Curtis rescued a group of lost mountaineers. The party included several members who were nationally recognized for their work in the areas of conservation, Indian ethnography, and publishing, among them, head of forestry, Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, C. Hart Merriman, and naturalist, conservationist, and renowned Indian authority, George Bird Grinnell. Not only were they grateful, several became interested in Curtis' photographic work. These contacts led to appointments to two important photographic expeditions. On the second of these expeditions, in 1900, Grinnell took Curtis to live among and photograph Indians in Montana and instructed him in the systematic methods required for gathering scientifically valid information. Only weeks after his experiences with Grinnell, Curtis initiated his own expedition to photograph Indians in the southwest.