Charles Brent Curtis (1860-1936) was elected to the United States Congress as a Republican in 1892. He completed 14 years of service in the House of Representatives and 20 in the Senate. Curtis was inaugurated as the thirty-first vice president of the United States in March 1929, the first Native American to have achieved this office.

Curtis was born on January 25, 1860 on the Kansa/Kaw Indian-allotted land which would later become part of North Topeka, Kansas. He was the eldest of two children, his sister, Elizabeth, being born in 1861. His father, Orren Armes Curtis, was a white man whose English ancestors originally arrived in America in the early 1600s. Orren Curtis was born in Eugene, Indiana, in 1829. He appears to have been married several times prior to marrying Ellen Pappan, the mixed-blood daughter of his employer, in 1859. Ellen Pappan Curtis' mother, Julie Gonville Pappan, was of Kansa/Kaw, Osage, and remote Potawatomi...