The heyday of anthropological collecting on the Northwest Coast took place between 1875 and the Great Depression, when public and private funds largely collapsed. The scramble for skulls and skeletons, poles, canoes, baskets, feast bowls, and masks, pursued sometimes with respect, but often with rapacity, went on until it seemed that almost everything not nailed down or hidden was gone.

This period of intense collecting coincided with the growth of anthropological museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Field collectors, including James Swan, Franz Boas, and George Dorsey, were intense rivals both in the race against time to preserve material culture and in the race to collect, sometimes unscrupulously, more artifacts than a rival museum could.

A new preface by the author, Douglas Cole, addresses repatriation rights and will be of particular interest to those seeking to understand museum collecting in light of current issues regarding repatriation of grave goods and artifacts.