No place, 1909. 4to. Joseph K. Dixon's original typed manuscript for The Vanishing Race. (xviii), 300 pp. In red and black ink. Illustrated with photogravure frontispiece and 74 photogravure plates. Full brown levant, decorated in gilt, small chip to head of spine, scattered wear along extremities; top edge gilt other edges trimmed; moiré silk endleaves; by H. Blackwell (Boston); scattered light spotting to text.

Joseph K. Dixon's original typed manuscript for his book, The Vanishing Race (1913).

Beginning in 1908, Dixon led three expeditions to the American West to document the lives and cultures of Native peoples of the United States, sponsored by philanthropist and department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker. Dixon and Wanamaker, "believed, like so many of their contemporaries, that the traditional Indian was destined to disappear…The old chiefs, by then fifty or sixty years old, were dying and their history was disappearing with them. It was time to gather the last generation to tell their stories and be photographed for Dixon's book...Representatives from nearly every reservation--Crow, Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Cayuse, Umatilla, Creek, Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne and Sioux--were assembled. Portraits were made of the chiefs, as well as scenes of camp life and battle. Dixon also re-enacted General George Armstrong Custer's Battle of the Little Bighorn for both film and still photographs..." (Fleming and Luskey, The North American Indians in Early Photographs, 1988, p. 217).

This typescript contains several differences compared to the published text, most noticeably in the shortened title, here as only "The Last Great Indian Council". Other differences compared to the published text include an additional dedication to Wannamaker; President Taft not mentioned in the Acknowledgement; the various Native American folk tales not included, nor Wanamaker's "The Concept". Furthermore, only 75 photogravures are included, several of which are different than the 80 that were published.

Lot includes Dixon's copy of the third edition of The Vanishing Race (1925), similarly bound as above, by Groschupf, Philadelphia.