Edward S. Curtis and The North American Indian
A detailed chronological biography
Compiled by Eric J. Keller, Founding Director, Soulcatcher Studio
February 16, 1868 – Edward Sheriff Curtis is born near Whitewater, Wisconsin. He is the second son of Johnson Asahel Curtis and Ellen Sheriff Curtis (shown at left). Johnson was a Union private and army chaplain during the Civil War and as a result of this service never fully recovered his health.
1873 or 1874 – The Curtis family moves to La Sueur County, Minnesota. Between 1866 and 1875 – More than 200 battles were fought between U.S. troops and tribes from the Dakota Territory to Mexico. 1876 – Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeat General George Custer and his troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Edward Curtis is 8 years old. |
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1877 – Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce are chased 1,700 miles by 2,000 US soldiers. They are within 40 miles of the Canadian border when they are captured and forced to surrender.
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1880 – The Curtis family moves to Cordova, Minnesota. Unable to resume the arduous life of a farmer, Johnson Curtis takes a job as a preacher for United Brethern Church, an evengelical sect that sends its ministers out into the countryside to preach. Johnson takes his young son Edward on these trips and teaches him canoeing, river navigation, and basic camping skills. They share a love of outdoor life.
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Edward builds his first camera at age 12 with the help of the Wilson’s Photographics manual. The lens for the camera was brought back from the Civil War by his father.
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Johnson Curtis’ health continues to fail and with his oldest son (Raphael) already gone, Edward assumes responsibility for supporting the entire family. He is just 14 years of age.
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Winter 1886 – The severe conditions of winter destroy what is left of Johnson’s health, along with the crops on the Curtis family plot.
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Fall 1887 – Johnson and Edward travel west to Portland, Oregon and make there way north to the Puget Sound. They settle in Sydney (now Port Orchard) where Edward cuts down spruce trees and builds a log cabin with a stone fireplace. Within a year Johnson convinces his wife Ellen to bring the remaining Curtis family members west. Seventeen year old Eva, thirteen year old Asahel and Ellen take the train to the Washington territory. Johnson Curtis dies of pneumonia in May 1888, just three days after their arrival.
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Clara Philips, (Edward’s future wife) and her family emigrate from eastern Canada to the Puget Sound.
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1890 – Edward injures his back while working in a lumberyard and is nursed back to health by Clara Philips. Soon after recovering Edward buys a 14 by 17 inch large view camera. His mother sees it as a waste of time and money.
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December 29, 1890 – The Battle of Wounded Knee marks the end of armed resistance by American Indians.
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1891 – Edward mortgages the family homestead and moves to Seattle. He buys a $150 share in a photography studio with Rasmus Rothi and opens “Rothi and Curtis, Photographers”.
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Clara Philips also relocates to Seattle at age seventeen. She shares Edward’s love for the scenic Northwest, but not photography.
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Spring 1892 – Edward and Clara are married. Edward leaves the Rothi partnership and forms a new studio with Thomas Guptill. Curtis and Guptill soon becomes the premeire photographic portrait studio in Seattle. He and his new bride live above the photography studio. Their first child, Harold, is born in November of 1893.
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1895 – Edward’s younger brother Asahel starts work as an engraver in the studio.
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Curtis becomes fascinated with the various Indian groups around the Seattle area. He later writes, “The first photograph I ever made of Indians was of Princess Angeline, the digger and dealer of clams. I paid the Princess a dollar for each picture I made. This seemed to please her greatly and with hands and jargon she indicated that she preferred to spend her time having her picture made than in digging clams.”
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1896 – Curtis and Guptill win the bronze medal at the National Photographers Convention in Chautauqua, New York. Argus magazine declares them the leading photographers in Puget Sound.
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May 5, 1896 – Beth, the Curtis’ 2nd child and 1st daughter is born. The Curtis family moves to a larger house where they are joined by Edward’s mother Ellen, sister Eva, brother Asahel, Clara’s sister Susie, her cousin Nellie Philips and Nellie’s son William. The entire family works at one time or another in the Curtis studio.
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May 31, 1896 – Princess Angeline (whose given name was Kickisomlo), daughter of the late, great Chief Sealth, for whom Seattle got its name, dies on the edge of the city’s skid row. |
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1897 – Guptill leaves the Curtis and Guptill Studio. It is renamed “Edward S. Curtis, Photographer and Photoengraver”. Clara manages the studio and also edits all of Curtis’ early writings.
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Gold Rush fever hits Seattle! |
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1898 – Two of Curtis’ photographs of Princess Angeline, “The Mussel Gatherer” and “The Clam Digger”, along with another Puget Sound image, “Homeward” (shown at left), are chosen for an exhibition sponsored by the National Photographic Society. “Homeward” goes on to win the exhibition’s grand prize and a gold medal.
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That same year Asahel Curtis goes to the Yukon to photograph the Gold Rush. He sends his glass plate negatives back to Seattle where Edward uses them to write an article that is published in the March issue of Century Magazine. He takes credit for the images that Asahel produced. Asahel returns to Seattle to discover this and demands the return of his photographs and negatives. Edward tells him that he is an employee of the Curtis Studio and the copyright belongs to the studio. Their relationship is severed. Asahel quits his job at the studio and moves out of the family home. The two brothers reportedly never speak to each other again.
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While climbing Mt. Rainier that year Curtis has a chance meeting that will change his life forever. He rescues a climbing party from certain disaster and in the process meets George Bird Grinnell and Clinton Hart Merriam. Grinnell is the editor of the influential Forest and Stream magazine, founder of the Audubon Society and an expert on Plains Indians. Merriam is the head of the U.S. Biological Survey and a founder of the National Geographic Society. They ask Curtis to join the Harriman Expedition to Alaska as official photographer.
Florence, the Curtis’ 3rd child is born (shown here on the far right). |
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May 30, 1899 – The E. H. Harriman Expedition leaves Seattle, bound for Alaska. It becomes the last great expedition of its kind to venture into western North America and is hailed as a great success. During the expedition Curtis is given a golden opportunity to learn the fundamentals of ethnographic research. |
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July 1900 – Grinnell invites Curtis to join him in Montana to witness the last great Sun Dance performed by the Plains Indians. This experience solidifies Curtis’ will to begin to document the North American Indian in earnest.
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August 1900 – Curtis travels to the southwestern U.S. to attend to mystical Hopi Snake Dance. It is a trip he will make over and over in his lifetime.
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Summer 1903 – Curtis holds his first photographic exhibition of his Indian images. He then travels to Washington, D.C. in an attempt to get financing from the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology for his North American Indian project. Although the B.A.E. claims such a project is impossible and refuses funding, Curtis meets one supporter in the form of Frederick Webb Hodge, the secretary of the B.A.E., and a highly respected ethnologist in this own right. Hodge will later be hired by Curtis to serve as editor for the entire North American Indian project.
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Undaunted, Curtis then travels to New York, hoping to find a publisher that will back his ambitious project. He is refused any help as no publisher is willing to invest the capital funds required to produce such a series of books.
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Back in Seattle, Curtis meets Adolph Muhr, a talented photographer in his own right, and hires him to run the Curtis Studio while he is away producing photographs for his project.
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Spring 1904 – Curtis adds a motion picture camera to his outfit and becomes the first white man to photograph the sacred Yeibechei Dance of the Navajo. The dancers perform the ceremony backward to secularize it. His achievement is hailed as a great triumph, having done what no other ethnographer had been able to do in twenty years of previous attempts. The Seattle Times reported, “His mysterious ability to go among the Indians and get that which they are determined not to reveal has brought him a letter from the highest Indian authority in the United States (Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp), commanding every Indian agent to do everything in his power to carry out the wishes of Mr. Curtis.”
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June 1904 – Curtis is invited by President Theodore Roosevelt to photograph his sons. During the meeting Roosevelt encourages Curtis to proceed with The North American Indian project.
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February 1905 – Curtis is invited by Leupp to photograph Geronimo during a visit to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. He gratefully accepts the invitation and makes his historic image of the aged leader on March 3rd. The following day he again photographs Geronimo, this time on horseback on the lawn of the White House. Geronimo is in Washington, D.C. on the occasion of Roosevelt’s Inaugural parade.
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Late spring 1905 – The first New York City exhibit of Curtis’ Indian photographs occurs at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. E. H. Harriman helps to arrange the show.
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June 20, 1905 – Curtis participates in a memorial service and reburial for Chief Joseph on the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington State.
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Summer 1905 – Curtis’ financial situation grows desperate. He writes Roosevelt for help in finding a patron. Roosevelt writes Curtis a glowing letter of recommendation which reads in part; “I regard the work that you have done as one of the most valuable works which any American could now do. The publication of the proposed volumes and folios, dealing with every phase of Indian life among all tribes yet in primitive condition, would be a monument to American constructive scholarship and research of a value quite unparalleled.“
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January 24, 1906 – While on a whirlwind tour of the East Coast to lecture and raise support for the project, Curtis is granted a meeting in New York with railroad magnate John Pierpont Morgan. Although he was abruptly dismissed, rather than leaving Curtis instead opens a folder of his Indian photographs and lays them on Morgan’s desk. After viewing the images Morgan agrees to provide Curtis with $75,000, to be paid at $15,000 per year for five years. The North American Indian project in earnest is born! In exchange for his financing the project Morgan will receive 25 complete sets of the publication, many of which he would later donate to various institutions.
Curtis would later write the following in the foreword to Volume I of The North American Indian. “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once...” |
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April 1906 – Curtis hires William Myers, a Seattle newspaper reporter and stenographer, to act as his field assistant. He is soon amazed at Myers’ astonishing skills at phonetics and becomes invaluable in translating Indian language and song.
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August 1906 – After making persistent inquiries for six years, Curtis is initiated into the Hopi Snake Dance religious society by Shipaulovi Snake Priest Sikyaletstiwa. He becomes perhaps the only white man to date to experience all aspects of this sixteen day initiation and ceremony.
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Later that year the snows of winter force Curtis and his crew to leave their fieldwork. They spend the next three months working seventeen hour days, seven days a week, preparing the text for Volumes I and II of The North American Indian.
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July 1907 – Curtis visits the Little Bighorn battlefield site on the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana. He records descriptions of the battle from the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who defeated General Custer there, as well as Apsaroke (Crow) how had served as Custer’s scouts. While there Curtis’ son Harold nearly dies from typhoid. He is slowly nursed back to health by his mother Clara, who vows to never again travel with Curtis during his fieldwork.
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Curtis’ Seattle Studio manager Adolph Muhr hires Imogen Cunningham to help keep up with the ever-growing work load in the studio. Cunningham would later go on to become a very successful photographer in her own right.
October 1907 – Curtis and his crew spend the month in a cabin on the Crow Reservation near Pryor, Montana, writing the text for Volumes III and IV. April 1908 – Curtis travels to New York to deliver the first two finished volumes to J.P. Morgan. He receives glowing reviews for their stunning content and quality.
C. Hart Merriam wrote: “Every American who sees the work will be proud that so handsome a piece of book-making has been produced in America; and every intelligent man will rejoice that ethnology and history have been enriched by such faithful and artistic records of the aboriginal inhabitants of our country.” |
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July 1909 – Curtis’ last child, Katherine (affectionately known as Billy) is born in Seattle while Curtis is in the field. She rarely sees him during her childhood.
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November 1909 – Curtis travels again to New York to outline his continued desperate financial situation to Morgan. Pleased with the first five volumes, Morgan agrees to advance Curtis an additional $60,000.
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Winter 1909 – Curtis and his crew work twenty hour days for months on end in a cabin on Puget Sound preparing the text for Volumes VI, VII and VIII.
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Spring 1910 – Field work resumes along the upper reaches of the Columbia River in eastern Washington. Curtis plans to travel by boat, following the same route that Lewis and Clark charted in 1803.
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June 1910 – Curtis purchases a 40-foot sailboat, the Elsie Allen, from a Skokomish fisherman and sails north with his crew to the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, British Columbia to visit the Kwakiutl. Once again he is able to witness secret, sacred ceremonies rarely seen by outsiders.
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Fall 1911 – As a means of raising much needed funds for The North American Indian, Curtis creates an elaborate ‘picture musicale’, combining hand colored lantern slides and motion pictures with live music. He takes the show to cities throughout the Northeast, including a sold-out performance at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Despite enthusiastic reviews and large audiences, production costs exceed ticket sales.
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Curtis creates the Continental Film Company in order to produce a series of motion pictures documenting all aspects of tribal life in the West, as a means of financing The North American Indian. His first film will be about the Kwakiutl. Curtis and his crew spend the next two seasons among the Kwakiutl, gathering information and preparing for the film. Curtis commissions dozens of villagers to carve and paint masks, full-sized totem poles, massive dugout canoes, artifacts and pre contact-style costumes for the film. |
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November 1912 – With preparations for filming underway, Curtis receives news from Seattle that his studio manager, Adolph Muhr, has died. Responsibility for running the Curtis Studio shifts to Muhr’s assistant, Ella McBride and Curtis’ 17-year-old daughter, Beth.
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December 11, 1912 – Ellen Sheriff Curtis dies in Seattle at the home of her son, Asahel. Edward and Asahel both attend the service, not speaking to each other the entire time.
March 31, 1913 – John Pierpont Morgan, Curtis’ primary patron, dies unexpectedly while traveling in Egypt. After some time Curtis is able to secure additional funds from Morgan’s son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr., and the project continues. The Morgan family would go on to contribute around $400,000, while Curtis himself would manage to raise twice, and perhaps even three times that amount on his own. Spring 1914 – Curtis travels to New York to oversee the publication of Volume IX. The following month he heads west, back to Arizona and the Hopi Reservation, and then north to Vancouver Island to begin filming In the Land of the Head-Hunters. Curtis pays the Kwakiutl men 50 cents each to shave off their facial hair and don wigs and clip-on nose rings to resemble their pre-contact Kwakiutl brethren.
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December 1914 – In the Land of the Head-Hunters premieres in New York City’s Casino Theatre. The poet and critic Vachel Lindsay declares that the film “has brought before my eyes a new vista of camera miracles,” and calls it a “supreme art achievement.” Despite critical acclaim the film is a financial disaster. The $75,000 investment in the project is lost and the film vanishes into obscurity.
1915 – Curtis publishes Volume X of The North American Indian, dedicated solely to the Kwakiutl. It is the only volume to date to focus on a single tribal group.
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1916 – Orotone (or goldtone) photographs begin to be produced by the Curtis Studio. These are glass plate positive photographs with a remarkably luminous quality obtained by printing a reversed, positive image on glass and then backing it with a mixture of powered forms of brass, copper and zinc, mixed with bronzing liquid (commonly referred to at the time as “banana oil”). They are then housed in very ornately molded and gilded frames. The process is perfected by the Curtis Studio and given the nickname Curt-Tone. Curtis produces Curt-Tones of some of his most popular Indian images and they soon become a great source of income for the studio. Within a few years several thousand of them are sold.
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October 16, 1916 – Clara J. Curtis files for divorce. Due to Curtis’ constant traveling and absences the case is not settled for three more years. The court awards Mrs. Curtis the family home and the Curtis Photography Studio. Before turning the studio over to Clara, Curtis’ daughter Beth and two assistants copy some of the glass plate negatives and then destroy all of the originals, in an attempt to prevent Clara from profiting from the Indian pictures.
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1919 – Curtis and his daughter Beth move to Los Angeles and open a new Curtis Studio in the Biltmore Hotel. Curtis drops out of the public eye and disappears from the city for long periods of time, perhaps due to the realization of his own mounting financial indebtedness and his failed marriage.
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Summer 1919 – Curtis returns again to the Hopi Reservation for the first time in six years. By this time Baptist, Mormon and Mennoite churches have been erected and the photographing of ceremonies has been banned. Due to this and other changes imposed by the U.S. Government, Curtis has a difficult time finding subjects to photograph that retain traditional tribal characteristics.
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1922 – Curtis travels to Northern California to make photographs for Volumes XIII and XIV. His daughter Florence joins him for the journey. By this time a seasoned journeyman, Curtis is not prepared for what he sees in the Indians of this region. In a letter to Edmond Meany he writes, “While practically all Indians suffered seriously at the hands of settlers and government, the Indians of this state suffered beyond comparison. The principle outdoor sport of the settlers during the 50s and 60s seemingly was the killing of Indians. There is nothing else in the history of the United States which approaches the inhumane and brutal treatment of the California Tribes.”
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Winter 1922 – Curtis publishes Volume XII, dedicated solely to the Hopi. It is the first volume published in six years.
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1923 – Cecil B. DeMille, who had befriended Curtis in the years after his move to Los Angeles, hires Curtis as second unit cameraman and still photographer for his monumental film, The Ten Commandments.
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Between 1923 and 1928 – Curtis relinquishes his copyright in all the photographs and text for The North American Indian to the Morgan Company, in exchange for the funds necessary to publish the remaining volumes. By this time he has completed seventeen of the twenty volumes.
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October 16, 1924 – Curtis sells all rights to his ground-breaking motion picture In the Land of the Head-Hunters, and ships his master print and negative to the American Museum of Natural History for just $1,500.
1924 – Curtis, with his daughter Beth’s support, joins Myers in the Southwest for part of the field work season.
Curtis helps found the Indian Welfare League, an organization of prominent men and women who lobby for the enfranchisement of American Indians. Due in great part to their efforts the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 passes, finally giving Native Americans the right to vote. |
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1925 – Curtis and Myers travel to Canada for another long season of field work. Many of the tribes they encounter have now been weakened by disease and demoralized by government assimilation policies.
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April 1926 – After serving nearly twenty years as Curtis’ invaluable assistant, William Myers quits.
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Summer 1926 – Curtis and his new assistant, Stewart Eastwood travel to Oklahoma. Due to tribal decimation, relocation and assimilation it becomes nearly impossible for Curtis to write accurate historical text for this volume.
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June 2, 1927 – Curtis, his daughter Beth, and assistant Eastwood board the steamer Victoria, bound for Nome, Alaska. This trip, financed by Beth, will gather the material necessary to complete the final volume of The North American Indian. Upon their arrival Curtis purchases a small fishing boat, the Jewel Guard, to travel north to the remote Nunivak, Diomede and King Islands in the Bering Sea. Curtis is ecstatic to encounter tribal groups that have as yet had no contact with missionaries and writes in his journal; “…should any misguided missionary start for this island I trust the sea will do its duty.”
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Physically exhausted but having successfully completed the fieldwork for the twentieth and final volume, Curtis returns by boat to Seattle where he will board a train bound for Los Angeles. During boarding he is stopped by Seattle Police and arrested for allegedly failing to pay his ex-wife Clara $4,500 for seven years of alimony and child support. The case is later dismissed for lack of evidence, but it has clearly taken a great mental toll on Curtis. He returns to Los Angeles a broken man.
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Christmas 1927 – Beth invites Curtis’ youngest daughter Katherine to spend the holiday with the family at Florence’s home in Medford, Oregon. This is the first time Curtis has ever been together with all of his children and the first time in thirteen years that Katherine has seen her father. He would remain close to all of them for the rest of his life.
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1928 – Volume XVIII of The North American Indian is published.
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1929 – The stock market crashes and the Great Depression smothers the U.S. economy. Curtis is unable to sell any additional subscriptions.
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1930 – With almost no fanfare Curtis publishes the final two volumes of The North American Indian. It has been estimated that during the production of The North American Indian Curtis has made over 40,000 photographs, some 10,000 wax cylinder sound recordings of Indian speech and music, and made at least 125 trips by train back and forth across the country. Having completed thirty years of exhausting and unending field work Curtis suffers a complete physical breakdown and checks himself into the New Rocky Mountain Hospital near Denver, Colorado.
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1932 – After recovering most, but not all of his health, Curtis pursues his interest in gold mining. He is seemingly struck with ‘gold fever’ and designs and patents the Curtis Counter Current Concentrator (shown at left), an ingenious recovery device used to extract fine gold from abandoned placer mines. He spends a significant amount of the remainder of his life mining gold throughout the Rockies, though never achieves much measurable success.
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November 20, 1932 – Clara Curtis dies. After the funeral, Curtis’ daughter Katherine moves to Los Angeles to be near her father.
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1935 – The Morgan Company liquidates all assets of The North American Indian, Inc., selling nineteen complete sets of The North American Indian, several thousand individual prints, and all of the 2,200+ original copper plates to Charles Lauriat Books of Boston, Massachusetts for the sum of $1,000 plus future royalties. Lauriat finds buyers for his nineteen complete sets and then assembles fifty more, supplementing the unbound material with new prints on different paper, bringing the total number of marketed sets to 291.
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1936 – Curtis is hired by famed motion picture director Cecil B. DeMille to shoot still and motion picture film for The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper. He revisits the Badlands of South Dakota where, thirty years earlier, he had photographed Sioux bands reenacting similar battle scenes near the Little Bighorn.
With the help and encouragement of daughters Beth and Katherine, Curtis begins to write his memoirs. Katherine later describes those times she spent with her father as the greatest part of her life. The memoirs are never published. March 7, 1941 – Asahel Curtis, for many years now a successful photographer in his own right, dies in Seattle at the age of 67. 1946 – Curtis moves to Beth and Manford Magnuson’s 12-acre ranch near Whittier, California. He continues to work on many writing projects and despite his ever-growing health problems, begins work on a manuscript entitled “The Lure of Gold”.
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August 26, 1948 – Curtis starts a lively correspondence with Seattle Public Librarian Harriet Leitch, speaking about his experiences in producing The North American Indian for the first time in nearly twenty years.
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October 19, 1952 – Edward Sheriff Curtis dies of a heart attack at the age of 84, at the home of his daughter Beth. A seventy-six word obituary in the New York Times mentions simply that Curtis had been an authority on Indian history and that he had also been known as a photographer. He was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
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Early 1970s – Karl Kernberger of Santa Fe, New Mexico travels to Boston after hearing about the possibility of finding Curtis’ original copper plates and photogravures at a bookstore there. He discovers at Lauriat’s Book Shop approximately 285,000 original photogravures as well as the copper plates that were used to print them almost fifty years earlier. He persuades two of his friends, Jack Loeffler and David Podwa, both of Santa Fe, to jointly purchase all of the remaining Curtis material, including the copper plates. The consortium was bought out in the mid to late 1970s by another group of investors led by Mark Zaplin, also of Santa Fe. The Zaplin Group owned the plates until 1982, when they sold them to a California-based group led by Kenneth Zerbe, the current owner of the plates.
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1972 – Bill Holm and George Quimby, both of the Thomas Burke Memorial Museum at the University of Washington, find and restore the only surviving print of Curtis’ 1914 motion picture In the Land of the Head-Hunters. .A new score of original music is added and performed by the Kwakiutl themselves. .It is renamed In the Land of the War Canoes: A Drama of Kwakiutl Life.. In 1999 the original film was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
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I would like to offer my most sincere thanks and highest gratitude to Anne Makepeace for providing much of the information contained within this chronology. I highly recommend her book, Edward S. Curtis : Coming to Light, published in November 2001 by the National Geographic Society, as well as her film by the same title. I would also like to thank Barbara A. Davis for her significant contributions in recording the history of Edward S. Curtis’ life and work. Her out-of-print book, Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher (shown here), is sometimes available in our bookstore.
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