Joseph Dixon was born in 1858 in Hemlock Lake, New York, to English immigrants. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Leavenworth, Kansas. Dixon attended college in Missouri and received a bachelor of divinity degree from the Rochester Theological Seminary. He worked as a pastor in New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania before he became a lecturer for Eastman Kodak photographic company in 1904. In 1906, Dixon was hired to work in the first Wanamaker department store.

In the summer of 1908, Rodman Wanamaker sponsored an expedition to the Crow Reservation in Montana to film The Song of Hiawatha. The expedition included Dixon's son, Rollin Lester Dixon. In 1909, Dixon returned to the reservation with 50 leaders from the Plains and Plateau tribes for The Last Great Indian Council. Dixon took photographs and interviewed them about their lives. In 1913, the interviews along with photographs were published as The Vanishing Race.

In 1913, Dixon began a third expedition to over 250 reservations and Native American communities throughout the country. The Expedition of Indian Citizenship was intended to combat poverty by granting American citizenship to Native Americans who pledged loyalty to the American flag and signed a declaration of allegiance. At each stop, Dixon played a speech by President Woodrow Wilson on a portable phonograph and gave them American flags. The expedition traveled by private railroad car equipped with a photography studio. Dixon was accompanied by his son and several photographers including John D. Scott, a New York photographer, and W.B. Cline, a photographer from George Eastman's studio in Rochester, New York. Photographs from the 1913 expedition were exhibited at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.

During World War I, Dixon proposed that the Army establish Native American scout regiments. Although his proposal was not accepted, the Army did establish a telephone squad which used Choctaw as code. After the War, Dixon photographed the Native American veterans and the battlefields for a book, From Teepees to Trenches. Joseph Kossuth Dixon died in 1926, two years after Native Americans were granted full United States citizenship.

Further Reading: Grand Endeavors of American Indian Photography, Paula Fleming and Judith Luskey, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1993.; North American Indian Portraits: Photographs from the Wanamaker Expeditions, Thomas W. Kavanagh, Curator of Collections, The William Hammond Mathers Museum, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Private Correspondence.; The North American Indians in Early Photographs, Thomas W. Kavanagh, Barnes & Noble, New York, 1986.; The Vanishing Race, Joseph Dixon, Doubleday, New York, 1913.

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