Archives West Finding Aid

Fred E. Miller was born on August 25, 1868 in Chicago Illinois and moved with his parents to Cherokee, Iowa when he was a child. Before graduating high school in 1885, he gained some experience as a commercial printer. After high school, Miller moved to Bloomfield, Iowa where he began his training as a professional photographer. He subsequently opened photography studios in McCook and Pauline, Nebraska from 1887 to 1892, and then in Clarksville, Iowa from 1892 to 1896.

It was in 1896 that Miller moved to Helena, Montana to join his widowed mother where he enrolled in business college and joined the National Guard. In 1897 he joined the civil service in the U.S. Land Office in Helena and one year later was appointed to a position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Crow Indian Reservation.

From 1898 to 1910, Miller served in various posts with the BIA, including land clerk and superintendent, and in the process, had developed important working relationships with the Crow people.

In 1905, Miller married part-Shawnee woman Emma Smith, who had moved from Kansas to be with her sister at the Crow Agency in Montana. Soon after their wedding, Chief Medicine Crow initiated Emma and Fred's adoption into the Crow tribe.

Based on his relationships with Crow families, particularly Crow youth from whom his Crow-given name "Boxpotapesh" (high kicker, as in football) derived, Miller was privileged with unprecedented access to viewing and photographing the cultural ceremonies, events, and family activities of his hosts. His camera captured a range of Crow life and people on the reservation, including chiefs, elders, children, burial scaffolds, dances, participants in the 1876 Little Big Horn campaign, and the Custer battlefield. The bulk of Miller's Crow Indian photographs came from this 1898-1910 period, a time of significant economic and political transition for the Crow people.

Though he did do some advertising for the sale of his work, Miller, a contemporary of prominent photographer Edward S. Curtis, did not seem to be motivated by financial gain from selling his Crow Indian photographs,. By 1919, Miller had begun a cattle ranching operation in the area, which struggled through the next decade and a half. Miller's ranching enterprise was subsidized by his employment in several civil service positions for the county of Big Horn in southeastern Montana. Emma and Fred had four children, Hulda, Edward, Robert, and Ruth before Emma's death in 1920. Miller died on April 20, 1936 in Hardin, Montana at the age of 67.

Nancy Fields O'Connor, the daughter of Hulda Miller Fields and Ralph Fields, and granddaughter of Fred and Emma Miller, was born in Spokane, Washington on December 13, 1929. Upon coming into contact with a few of Miller's photographs as a young adult, and learning of her grandfather's work as a professional photographer, Nancy began tracking down and collecting the remaining glass plate negatives from Miller's collection in the 1970s to 1980. Nancy's campaign to collect these materials was necessary as Miller's personal effects were sold at court-ordered public auction following his death, including roughly 500 glass plate negatives (the majority of which were destroyed in the 1950s). Chicago Albumen Works took in the collection for conservation work and inventorying. Nancy served as the curator for the Miller collection and assembled a volume of essays dedicated to the collection titled Fred E. Miller: Photographer of The Crows, published in 1985. Since the 1990s, the collection has been featured at several prominent museums, including the Great Plains Art Museum at the University of Nebraska. Nancy died on October 10, 2014. Nancy's brother and grandson of Miller, John Fields, along with Miller's granddaughter Mary Reynolds, donated the Fred Miller photograph and manuscript collections to the Montana Historical Society in 2016.