Vintage 1970s Edward S. Curtis Hupa Trout-Trap Folio Page 📜 Native American Fishing Weir 18 x 13

Size: 18 x 13 inches

📜 Vintage 1970s Edward S. Curtis Folio Page — Hupa Trout-Trap

I love this picture. A Hupa man is bent right over a fish trap in the middle of a white-water river, spear in hand, his whole attention on what is moving under the surface. Behind him the forest climbs straight up into the mist, and a fence of lashed poles runs across the current on both sides of him. Edward S. Curtis took it in 1923 and called it exactly what it is: HUPA TROUT-TRAP.

This is a big leaf, 18 by 13 inches, from one of the large folio books of Curtis's portfolio plates that came out in the 1970s, when the whole country rediscovered him. The picture runs nearly edge to edge, the caption sits alone at the lower left in the same open-face capitals Curtis's printers used, and the back carries the book's page number, 92. One long edge still shows where it came out of the binding. It is a grand way to own one of his river scenes at a sensible price, and it is plenty big enough to hang and be looked at.

🎣 What You Are Looking At

The Hupa built fish weirs across their river every year. Curtis wrote about one in the same volume this picture belongs to: "Each summer a substantial structure of this kind is thrown across the river, the southern and the northern divisions of the tribe alternating. The weir remains in place until the spring freshets carry it away." Building one was a job for the whole community, and so was the catch. In his words, "the catch is divided each evening according to the requirements of the various families."

What you see here is the working end of it. The poles are lashed into panels and set against the boulders so the water pours through while the fish are turned into the box, and the man stands in the current at the trap with his spear. Nothing about it is posed for effect. It is a man doing a job his people had been doing on that river for a very long time.

🌲 The Hupa and the Trinity River

The Hupa call themselves Natinixwe, the people of the Hoopa Valley. Their valley sits on the Trinity River in the northeast corner of Humboldt County, California, and they have lived along that river and its creeks for thousands of years. Unlike most California tribes, the Hupa were never marched off their own land. An 1864 treaty recognised the valley as theirs, and today the 85,445-acre Hoopa Valley Reservation is the largest in the state, home to a federally recognised tribe of around 2,000 enrolled members.

The river was the center of everything. Spring salmon fishing stations at the Sugar Bowl rapids, near the upper end of the valley, were handed down in families. And here is the part I like best: the weir never went away. In 2016 the Hoopa Valley Tribe began running a modern harvest weir on the reservation, built on the same ideas as the one in this picture, and in September 2026 the tribe and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife opened a single jointly run weir on the Trinity. A hundred years after Curtis stood on the bank with his camera, the Hupa are still fishing their river with a weir.

📷 Edward S. Curtis and The North American Indian

Curtis was born in Wisconsin in 1868 and made his name as a portrait photographer in Seattle. In 1906 J. P. Morgan put up $75,000 for the project Curtis had been dreaming about: a record, in pictures and words, of the Native peoples of the American West while the old ways could still be seen. Theodore Roosevelt wrote the foreword. It took Curtis until 1930 to finish. Along the way he visited some 80 tribes, exposed about 40,000 negatives and recorded more than 10,000 songs on wax cylinders.

The result was The North American Indian, twenty volumes of text, each with a portfolio of big loose photogravures. Curtis hoped to sell 500 sets. He found 222 subscribers and printed fewer than 300, and most of them went to libraries and institutions. Volume XIII came out in 1924 and covered the peoples of northwest California and southern Oregon: the Hupa, Yurok, Karok, Wiyot, Tolowa and Tututni, Shasta, Achomawi and Klamath. Hupa Trout-Trap was plate 439 in its portfolio, pulled by hand from a copper plate by the Suffolk Engraving Company of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a sheet 17 7/8 by 22 inches. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth has one, and an original of that portfolio plate is offered today at $1,750.

📚 How This Page Came To Be

This is the story I enjoy telling. When the project ended, Curtis was broke. In 1935 the Morgan estate sold the rights and all the leftover material to the Charles E. Lauriat Company, a Boston bookseller, for $1,000 and a share of future royalties, and it went down into Lauriat's basement and stayed there. Around 1970 a Santa Fe photographer named Karl Kernberger went to Boston looking for Curtis's copper plates, and he found them, along with more than 200,000 finished photogravures that had never left the building.

That find set off a Curtis revival that has never really stopped, and the big folio books of the early 1970s were part of it. The one this page matches is Portraits from North American Indian Life, a big landscape folio published in New York in 1972 by Promontory Press, by arrangement with Outerbridge & Lazard. It was made from the loose portfolio plates and printed on heavy cream paper, with each picture run nearly full size and its caption set alone at the lower left, exactly like this one. The introductions were by A. D. Coleman, the photography critic who wrote for the Village Voice and the New York Times, and T. C. McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's daughter, whose book Touch the Earth had come out the year before from the same Outerbridge. Two years later she made The Shadow Catcher, the documentary about Curtis narrated by Donald Sutherland.

So this leaf carries two stories at once: Curtis on the Trinity in 1923, and the 1970s rediscovery that brought him back to the rest of us.

🖼️ Condition and Display

You get the exact sheet in the photos. The image is strong and clean, the paper has mellowed to a warm cream, and the binding edge shows where it was taken out of the book. At 18 by 13 it fills a frame nicely over a desk, in a den, a fishing cabin or anywhere a love of rivers and the old West lives. A great gift for a fly fisherman, a Curtis collector, or anyone with roots in Humboldt County and the Trinity country.

📐 The Details

• Photographer: Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952)
• Title: Hupa Trout-Trap
• Photograph: 1923; portfolio plate 439, The North American Indian, Volume XIII (1924)
• This sheet: a 1970s folio book page, caption printed at lower left, page number 92 on the back
• Printing: sepia, the picture nearly full size
• Size: 18 x 13 inches
• Subject: Hupa fishing at a weir on the Trinity River, Hoopa Valley, Humboldt County, California