“C. M. Bell may be best known today for his Native Americans' photographs, which he began to produce in 1873. It was Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, who turned to him for the continuation of a project that had begun several years earlier. The assignment was to photograph as many of the Indian visitors to the capital as possible, during this period of intense treaty negotiations. A trip to the photographer's studio was apparently a reward accorded to cooperative chiefs. Hayden had employed photographers for the project from the studios of Washington photographers Alexander Gardner, A. Zeno Shindler, and Julius and Henry Ulke. In 1879, when Hayden's collection of negatives was turned over to the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, Bell continued to be of service. For the Smithsonian, he made the photographs used as the basis for some of the illustrations of Garrick Mallery's classic work, "Sign Language among North American Indians," published in the first annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1879-80.”

-Dr. Kathleen Collins, The Washingtoniana, 1989