Harmon Percy Marble

Marble photograph taken on the Menominee Reservation between 1913 and 1918

Harmon Percy Marble (born November 5, 1870 in Pawnee County, Nebraska – died 1945) was a mayor in Las Vegas and photographer of Native Americans.

As a young adult, he worked for a number of years in the newspaper business, founding his own paper, the Humboldt Leader (probably Humboldt, Nebraska), in 1897. In 1911, he sold the paper in order to join the government Indian Service. He was first assigned to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, then in 1913 to the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, followed by work with the Sioux tribes at Fort Thompson, South Dakota. Later he was in charge of the Southern Pueblos in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and finally returned to Arizona. In 1926, he retired from the Indian Service ^[1] and moved to Long Beach, California where he owned a cigar store. Later he joined family in Las Vegas, Nevada and lived out his remaining years there. He was a prominent civic leader and mayor of Las Vegas,^[2] and was instrumental in establishing the first low-income family housing development there, which was renamed Marble Manor in his honor after his death in 1945.

Photographer

Marble is best known as a prolific photographer of Native Americans. During his government career, he took advantage of opportunities afforded by his positions to take hundreds of photographs of the Navajo, Menominee, and Sioux tribes. His photographs were inconsistently exposed, often poorly composed and poorly printed. However, this lack of artistic sense rendered photos which offer an unvarnished portraiture of the indigenous population more so than better known images captured by contemporaries the likes of Edward Curtis and Rodman Wanamaker.

References

1. "Harmon Percy Marble". Native American Images. nativeamericanlinks.com. Retrieved December 7, 2012.
2. "Lot 43331, H.P. Marble Image of Menomonee Reservation Indians, circa 1915....". Heritage Auctions. Retrieved December 7, 2012.

Some of the information above was taken from hand-written family biographical documents acquired with the accompanying photograph.

External links

• Images of Harmon Percy Marble photographs
• Harmon Percy Marble video essay
• Navajo man and woman, Warren Trading Post Co., Kayenta, Arizona Albumen photograph, Harmon Percy Marble, 1926