Erastus S. Curry Collection
Dr. Curry
in Brief
During the seventy
years of his lifetime, the man who assembled this collection
wore many hats: minister/missionary, physician and (it was said)
"practical" dentist, collector of Indian lore, archeologist,
farmer, author, and printer. First and foremost, however, he
seems to have been an explorer and seeker of knowledge.
Born in 1835 in Ontario, Canada, Erastus Curry spent his early
years on the family farm. Only as a young man did he move to
Montreal, so that he could attend McGill University. In 1866,
Dr. Curry was accepted into the ministry and that same year married
Eliza Jane Cleary. (She, too, had received her education at McGill.)
For the next twenty years, Dr. Curry served as a Methodist medical
missionary, after their marriage moving with Mrs. Curry to his
first post in Michigan. Click here
to find an abbreviated entry for Curry at the Canadian Methodist
Missionaries site, and here
to see a copy of his ordination certificate.]
Although employed by the Canadian Methodist Missionary Board, Dr. Curry spent the bulk of his missionary career in the United States and at some point appears to have changed his religious affiliation from Methodist to Congregationalist. In 1901, five years before his death, he became a U.S. citizen.
Because he spent much of his youth with Indians living near his family's farm in Ontario, Dr. Curry began his study of Native American legends at an early age. As he grew older, he wrote down these legends, adding them to those he later heard from the Iroquois living near Montreal, from the Ojibway he encountered while working as a missionary in Michigan, and from several other tribes further south.
His nuanced grasp of tribal languages led Curry in some surprising directions for a man of his time and origins. Eventually he was adopted into a tribe; Ah-yah-be-dwa-we-deng, the name given him by the Indians, means "the ever-pleading voice." In this case, the pleading voice would likely refer to Curry's quest for more knowledge about the indiginous peoples. He had by then concluded that what he originally assumed to be stories that Native Americans invented to amuse themselves were instead a form of historical record passed from generation to generation. Tracking down such records became his life's work.
Of Curry it was said that he "can walk through the densest forests straight to a place he wishes to reach, with the aid of the woodcraft he learned from the Indians. He can translate the Indian picture writing in rocks and on the sides of cliffs and says he is the discoverer of a legendary, but truthful Indian history of the creation of the world."
A man of modest means, Dr. Curry found the financing of his field studies to be a never-ending source of worry and frustration, remarking in his second book that debt and hunger were the only alternative if he continued in his quest "and I had to contend with considerable of both."
Eventually, Dr. Curry gave up the ministry and turned to farming as a way to acquire more funds for his explorations. That helped somewhat, but the family was always strapped for funds. Sometimes Dr. Curry was able to raise money through public lectures and was reported to provide "scholarly and original entertainments." His daughters, now grown and teaching school, helped financially as much as they could. But it was often a hard road of disappointment and setbacks that Curry and, inevitably, his family, traveled.
Over a period of roughly eighteen years, Dr. Curry researched and wrote his two books: The No-din, and Prehistoric Races of America and Other Lands as Disclosed Thru Indian Traditions (the latter volume intended to be the first of a series of four or five). In the succeeding volumes, Curry intended to set forth his several theories relative to the history of the American continent, one of these being that America was the site of the very first generations of the human family.
Dr. Curry and his family published and printed both books themselves. Together, they undertook the monumental task of mastering (from "scratch") the printing technology of the day and building their own printing press, all this carried out with very little money. Even the plates used for illustrations were engraved by the family.
Finally, Curry could keep it going no longer. Thwarted continually by insufficiant funds and plagued by illness, his own and that of his family (two sons had already contracted typhoid fever), Dr. Curry was beginning to see the writing on the walls. The death of his next-eldest daughter dealt the coup de grace. Both beautiful and accomplished, Annie Curry had cheered the family with her bright spirit and had advanced the publication endeavor in very practical ways. To lose this child at a mere twenty-four was a crushing blow to the Currys.
Before long, Dr. Curry fell
ill himself. When he had recovered enough to travel, Erastus
and Eliza Jane Curry moved out to the state of Washington where
they joined a son on his farm in Stevens County. Dr. Curry never
fully regained his health; in 1906, but two years later, he died
at "Snowflake Ranch," further volumes of his opus remaining
unwritten.
Erastus Scott Curry (1836 - 1906)