He and his wife also provided a home in Topeka for his half-sister Dolly Curtis before her marriage. His wife died in 1924. A widower when elected vice president in 1928, Curtis had his married half-sister, "Dolly" Curtis Gann (March 1866 – January 30, 1953), act as his official hostess for social events. She had lived with her husband Edward Everett Gann in Washington, DC since about 1903. He was a lawyer and once an assistant attorney general in the government. Attuned to social protocol, Dolly Gann insisted in 1929 on being treated officially as the number-two woman in government at social functions. The diplomatic corps voted to change a State Department protocol to acknowledge this while her brother was in office. To date, Curtis is the last vice president who was unmarried during his entire time in office. Alben W. Barkley, who served as vice president from 1949 to 1953, entered office as a widower but remarried while in office. First elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives of the 53rd Congress, Curtis was re-elected for the following six terms. Naturally gregarious, he also made the effort to learn about his many constituents and treated them as personal friends. While serving as a Representative, Curtis sponsored and helped pass the Curtis Act of 1898; it extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory. As such, it ended their self-government and provided for allotment of communal land to individual households of tribal members, after they were registered on official rolls. It limited their tribal courts and government. Any lands not allotted were to be considered surplus by the federal government, which sold plots to non-Natives. Based on his personal experience, Curtis believed that Indians could benefit by getting a mainstream education, assimilating, and joining the main society. Implementation of this act completed the extinguishing of tribal land titles in Indian Territory, which prepared the larger territory to be admitted as the state of Oklahoma, which was done in 1907. The government tried to encourage Indians to accept individual citizenship and lands and to take up European-American culture. By the end of the century, it had set up boarding schools for Indian children as another method of assimilation. Curtis re-enrolled in the Kaw Nation, which had been removed from Kansas to Indian Territory when he was in his teens. In 1902, the Kaw Allotment Act disbanded the Kaw Nation as a legal entity and provided for the allotment of its communal land to members, in a process similar to that endured by other tribes.