This little schoolhouse provided education (of a sort) to all those Native American students, all the youngsters from the Havasupai tribe. Today the tribe numbers around 600 persons, but there were fewer in 1901 when this picture was taken, the only figures I’ve found suggest about 200 in 1882, and say that only 106 survived the epidemics of the early 1900s. The Havasupai are the only people living inside the Grand Canyon. They still all speak their native language, also called Havasupai. The reservation is the Havasupai Reservation. But the single town, though sometimes mistakenly called Havasupai, is actually Supai, or in the Havasupai language Havasuuw.

This public domain image was taken by Henry Greenwood Peabody, born in Saint Louis Missouri 27 Apr 1855, he married Dora Crocker Phelps 23 Dec 1880 in Evanston Illinois and had one daughter. Peabody took up photography in the late 1870s, and though he lived in Evanston, probably worked in Chicago. By 1890 he was working in Boston Massachusetts for Allen & Rowell Co., a photographic supply company. During this time he became known as a marine photographer, and published photo books on The Coast of Maine (1889) and Representative American Yachts (1891). Later Peabody went to work for the Detroit Publishing Company and began to travel widely, taking photographs like this one in Arizona, and others as far flung as California, New York, and British Columbia in Canada. In 1905 he quit working for Detroit Publishing, and began touring the country with his ‘magic lantern’ slide-shows on National Parks, Monuments and Native American subjects. Although one biographical sketch claims he continued in photography until shortly before his death, he is listed as a salesman in the 1930 census in Pasadena California, and we have found no photos attributed to him late than about 1920. He died in Los Angeles on March 25th 1951.