Harmon Percy Marble

Harmon Percy Marble (born November 5, 1870 in Pawnee County, Nebraska – died 1945) was a mayor in Las Vegas and photographer of Native Americans.

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 government Indian Service. He was first assigned to the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, then in 1913 to the Menominee 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. In 1926, he retired from the Indian Serviceand moved to Long Beach, California where he owned a cigar store. 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, and was instrumental in establishing the first low-income family housing development there, which was renamed Marble Manor in his honor after his death in 1945.

Marble is best 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.