The Vanishing Race

Joseph Kossuth Dixon was a Baptist preacher and lecturer, but he is most famous as a photographer. His fame is a result of the photographs taken on the Wanamaker expeditions. Rodman Wanamaker was a department store magnate in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), New York City, and Paris. He was a patron of education, arts, golf, athletics, Native American scholarship, and an investor in early aviation. He financed three photographic expeditions, between 1908 and 1913, to the American Indians, whose goal was to document the vanishing of this antique race and making them first-class citizens. They were seen as a vanishing race at that time and there were efforts to stop that.

Joseph was the official photographer and expedition leader of these expeditions and took over 8000 photos of the Native Americans. Through his photographs, Joseph emphasized the romanticism of the Indians, which was the intention of Wanamaker.

The photographs, Joseph took on the first expedition, are found in this book. Through them, it is given an overview of the life of the Native Americans, their culture, customs, beliefs, their way of seeing the world and the nature and their connection with the nature itself.

This book, apart from presenting the photographs from the expedition, tells the story of the last great Indian Council, in which participated important Indian chiefs from almost every Indian reservation in the United States, and the story of their lives told by themselves. You will find here their speeches and folklore tales and many other elements of their life.