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Harmon Percy Marble

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Harmon Percy Marble
13th Mayor of Las Vegas
In office
1938–1939
Preceded byLeonard L. Arnett
Succeeded byJohn L. Russell
Personal details
Born
Harmon Percival Marble

(1870-11-05)November 5, 1870
Table Rock, Nebraska, U.S.
DiedFebruary 3, 1945(1945-02-03) (aged 74)
Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
ProfessionJournalist and politician

Harmon Percival Marble (November 5, 1870 – February 3, 1945) was an American journalist and politician. He was the mayor of Las Vegas from 1938 to 1939 and was a photographer of Native Americans. He was a member of the Democratic Party.

Career

Indian Service

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 Indian Service. He was first assigned to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, then in 1913 to the Menominee Indian 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.

Las Vegas

In 1926, he retired from the Indian Service and moved to Long Beach, California, where he owned a cigar store.[1] 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 in the city, which was renamed "Marble Manor" in his honor after his death in 1945.[3]

Photography

Marble photograph taken on the Menominee Reservation between 1913 and 1918

Marble is 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.[4]

References

  1. ^ "Harmon Percy Marble". Native American Images. nativeamericanlinks.com. Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved December 7, 2012.
  2. ^ "Lot 43331, H.P. Marble Image of Menomonee Reservation Indians, circa 1915..." Heritage Auctions. Retrieved December 7, 2012.
  3. ^ "Marble, Harmon Percy, 1870-1945 | BYU Library - Special Collections". archives.lib.byu.edu. Retrieved 2021-08-17.
  4. ^ "Harmon Percy Marble was the mayor of Las Vegas for a year, but he is better known as a photographer of Native Americans, including this picture of Menominee taken between 1910 and 1926. (Special t …". Las Vegas Review-Journal. Retrieved 2021-08-17.
Political offices
Preceded by Mayor of Las Vegas
1938–1939 		Succeeded by
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