Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (13 page)

Inside the red sandstone walls of the Smithsonian Castle, Curtis gave an exhaustive
presentation to some of the nation’s leading authorities on American Indians. His
way inside had been greased by favorable words from Grinnell and Merriam. Curtis planned
to document eighty tribes, he explained: all the people in North America still living
somewhat of a “primitive existence.” Eighty tribes? The figure made jaws drop; it
amounted to one of the largest anthropological projects ever undertaken in the United
States. He would make audio recordings of songs and languages so the words would never
be lost, even if the tribes disappeared. He would write down their music so people
could play it later. And finally, he planned to use a heavy, stand-up device that
a few photographers were just starting to tinker with: a moving-picture camera. Moving
pictures?
The Great Train Robbery,
the first narrative film, had recently been released. So lifelike. Curtis explained
that he would use this camera to film the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo. This last
task struck the learned men at the Smithsonian as preposterous. Well-trained doctors
of science had been trying for years to get close enough to the Navajo to obtain pictures
and interpretations of the Yeibichai Dance. It was impossible. In closing, Curtis
insisted that for all the other work he intended to do, in the main his great undertaking
would be a picture record—using only the finest and costliest finishing process—of
the daily lives of the first Americans. And, of course, it was art as well, a subjective
look, by the very nature of how and where he pointed the camera.

Though Curtis had impressed Frederick Webb Hodge, the top official of Indian affairs
at the Bureau of Ethnology and the editor of
American Anthropologist,
the other authorities at the Smithsonian were unmoved. They rejected him outright.
He would get nothing from the nation’s foremost storehouse of its history and artifacts.
They doubted that Curtis could ever pull off such an immense project, and they were
wholly unimpressed with his credentials. For God’s sake, he’s
uneducated!
Curtis was clearly indignant at the setback, and it hurt.

More humiliation was to come. During the same trip, he went to New York in search
of a book backer. Surely he would have no problem finding a major publisher. In Manhattan,
Curtis outlined his plan to Walter Page at Doubleday. The editor gave Curtis a respectful
listen. But Page was troubled, he told the upstart from Seattle, by how many Indian
products were already on the market—books, portfolios, cards.

“Couldn’t give ’em away,” said Page.

That is, unless Curtis wanted to do something along the lines of Karl May’s depictions
of that hardy perennial, the Noble Savage. May was a German author who sold millions
of books about Indians well before he ever saw one, or set foot in America.
No, no, no
—Curtis wanted realism, albeit with a humane touch, and he insisted that his published
works be produced in a costly finishing and printing process. If that was the case,
Page informed him, this collection would have to sell for a much higher price than
normal picture books. How much higher? A typical hardback might cost $1.50. The multivolume
Curtis books would have to fetch several hundred dollars, maybe $1,000 or more, just
to break even. A thousand dollars: that’s what the average American earned in a year.
Only the very rich, and the largest cultural institutions and universities, could
afford them. And even that high-end market might not be enough to support the publication.
But see here, Curtis countered, his Indian pictures were unique—
look at them!
These portraits were not dime-store savages or cartoon maidens or Karl May fantasies.
He intended to make publishing history. Sorry, Page said, there’s just no audience
for fine Indian pictures. With the rejections, Curtis could not build his team beyond
Phillips and Muhr. Until he could find a deep funding source, all other hiring was
on hold.

At Sagamore Hill, Curtis was unsure how the president would feel about his fascination
with Indians. In his early writing, Roosevelt had been none too sympathetic. He called
them “filthy” and “lecherous” and “faithless” in his volume of western history published
in 1896. What he had seen of Indians during his ranching days, tribes decimated by
disease and war, “were but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than
that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.” A decade earlier, he
had been even more cruelly glib. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good
Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t
inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” In almost every respect—personal
hygiene, sexual relations, the worship of multiple spirits, the tribal approach to
battle, preferring to ambush and raid instead of lining up in formation for a formal
fight—the Indian way was appalling to the settled customs and manners that had produced
the Roosevelts of New York City. But later, as a warrior colonel, with Indians among
his Rough Riders who charged up San Juan Hill in 1898, Roosevelt for the first time
saw natives who were heroic. He was moved by how fearless they were, riding into a
blizzard of enemy fire on behalf of the American flag. As president, his views continued
to evolve. Like everything else on American soil, Indians were in his care now, a
tenuous trust relationship.

Still, Roosevelt was not a likely ally for Curtis. The photographer faced a tough
dilemma: could a man whose dream was to humanize Indians persuade a man who was so
dismissive of them to back his work? The question roiled Curtis while spending long
days and intellectually stimulating evenings with the Roosevelts and their circle.
Should he dare to ask the president to intervene? Was there something he could do
to get the Smithsonian experts to change their minds? Or could he set Curtis up with
one of his friends, a patron with deep pockets?

But first he had to humanize the first family. He shot pictures of the boys in a
variety of settings: outside, in the library, at play, in serious thought. Quentin,
the youngest son, looks pleading in his close-up, no easy smile, his eyes holding
his emotion. After finishing with the children, Curtis persuaded the president to
pose for him—a formal portrait. In it, Roosevelt is seen from the chest up, in dark
suit, knotted tie, gray-speckled mustache, his pince-nez in front of his eyes as usual.
But two things stand out: the light, showing one half of Roosevelt’s face as if it
were a waning moon, and the jawbone, which is stern but not forced or clenched in
fighter mode. Those ferocious teeth, a favorite of cartoonists, are hidden behind
a closed mouth. The president looks bookish, studious, pensive. Curtis loved the effect,
and believed he had captured a Roosevelt seldom seen. When he developed the picture,
he used a process reserved for less than one percent of his pictures: orotone. “The
ordinary photographic print lacks depth and transparency,” said Curtis in one of his
brochures explaining the technique. But with orotone, even dull stones “are as full
of life and sparkle as an opal.” The image is printed directly onto glass and then
backed with gold spray: a difficult and very expensive way to finish a photograph
in 1904.

“My picture of the President is great,” Curtis wrote Gifford Pinchot. “It is quite
different from anything before taken and, I believe, will be considered by all who
know him, a splendid likeness. I made no effort to re-touch up the face and make him
a smooth-visaged individual without a line or anything to show character.” Well! Pinchot
could have popped a vest button at the brazen, breathless self-regard coming from
the man the Indians called the Shadow Catcher, a name he had been given in Arizona.
But it wasn’t just self-praise. The social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis, a Roosevelt
intimate, was equally impressed after he saw the print. “It is more than a picture,”
he said. “It is the man himself.”

At the end of his stay with the family, Curtis opened his Indian portfolio to the
president. He showed him the handsome Hopi men from Walpi, the giggly-faced Hopi women
with their hair in those tight flower whorls, the Blackfeet praying in the high-plains
heat. In the past few years, Roosevelt himself had traveled throughout the Southwest,
seeing much of it for the first time. The Hopi and Navajo dwellings in the Curtis
pictures—strong, well-built homes holding to cliffs—were anything but the dingy, transient
tents and lean-tos of Roosevelt’s earlier view. As part of his expanding knowledge
of the country he governed, Roosevelt was starting to see the legacy of indigenous
human life in the same way he saw the natural world—something that would be lost if
present trends continued.

The
living
Indian communities were another story. Roosevelt was influenced by those who believed
that tribal ties should be loosened, and natives eventually given full U.S. citizenship—assimilated,
like recent European immigrants. The portrait of Chief Joseph, who had also posed
with his mouth closed, eyes intense, caught the president’s attention. After hearing
Curtis out, Roosevelt said the project was a
bully
idea, and a noble one, important to America’s lasting sense of self. Without being
specific, he made a promise to Curtis in written form:

“No man could be doing anything more important,” he wrote. “I will support you in
any way I can.”

In July of 1904, Curtis spent a frenzied few days with the joys of his home life:
ten-year-old Hal, eight-year-old Beth and six-year-old Florence. The children hardly
knew their father during the first years of the Indian project, Florence said later,
but when he was around, the house was full of radiant sunlight. Stories, games, questions,
tricks all flowed from the towering and peripatetic man. He renewed his vow to take
the family—why not all of them?—on a long trip to Indian country. Soon. Appointments,
requests and unanswered letters were stacked all over the house. They would have to
wait.

He checked in with Muhr, running the technical side of the studio, fine-finishing
the negatives Curtis brought home from the tribes. Muhr had never worked harder. “His
example is so contagious,” Muhr said of his boss, “that everyone connected with him
seems fired by the same enthusiasm and imbued with the same energy and ambition.”
That contagion had spread to Ella McBride, the mountaineer Curtis had met on Rainier
a few years earlier. Curtis had talked her into leaving her teaching job in Portland
and moving to Seattle, where she became indispensable behind the camera at the studio.
She also lived in the Curtis home, and was like a second mother, the girls said later.

Out the door Curtis went again. For the rest of the summer and into the fall Curtis
worked at breakneck speed, bouncing all over the Southwest with a small entourage,
usually including a few translators, and Phillips. In New Mexico Territory, west of
Albuquerque, he arrived at what was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the
United States, nine hundred years. Descendants of the Anasazi, the people had built
a community on a mesa seven thousand feet above sea level and named their fortress
Acoma, a word that means “the place that always was.” Curtis found Acoma in the high-desert
air just as he had found Supai in a basement next to the Colorado River—a cluster
of people living in a remarkable redoubt, forgotten by the rest of the world. After
dealing with Europeans of one sort or another for three hundred years, Acomans were
cautiously accommodating.

Curtis was taken to the top, where women drew their water from a deep well and balanced
the painted earthen jars on their heads. He climbed ladders to houses of sun-blasted
rock. He was shown the cliffs where the natives had rolled giant boulders down on
enemies—white, red and brown. They worshiped Jesus and the sun at Acoma, in equal
measure, “a positive argument that a people can be loyal followers of two religious
creeds at one and the same time,” Curtis wrote in
Scribner’s,
which published several large spreads of Curtis’s photojournalism. Their prize possession
was a silver-crowned cane given them by Abraham Lincoln as a reward for loyalty to
the Union. Curtis heard of the three-day battle with Don Juan de Oñate’s conquistadors
in 1598, the worst blow in the history of Acoma. The Spanish burned homes, raided
food supplies, threw men from the cliff and marched the surviving stragglers off to
a makeshift prison in the valley. There, Oñate pronounced them guilty of violating
the Act of Obedience and Homage, though most had never taken the oath Spain had forced
on the natives. For punishment, every man over the age of twenty-five was to have
one foot cut off; those younger were sentenced to slavery. Nearly two centuries passed
before the Sky City of Acoma regained its preinvasion population. But people never
entirely deserted the rock. They had been written off, like Indians in general; in
obscurity, they eventually thrived.

Over several days, Curtis hiked up and down the winding, narrow passage to the summit
village, a footpath of rock polished by wear over ten centuries. He shot
At the Old Well of Acoma,
one of his most Edenic still lifes, showing two veiled young women gathering water
with their intricately painted vases. Calm pools of water always brought out the painterly
side of Curtis. Near the base of the mesa looking up, he did a different kind of day-in-the-life,
called
The Old Roadway of Acoma.
Like Georgia O’Keeffe, another artist who found renewal in New Mexico, Curtis loved
the light in the Land of Enchantment.

Back in Arizona, Curtis went to see his friends in the Hopi Nation, and predictably,
the high priest Sikyaletstiwa again rejected his request for entry in the Snake Society.
For The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath, this was the third visit to the Hopi. He could
watch. He could shoot pictures. And, in a step closer, this time he was invited to
climb down into a kiva where priests tamed rattlesnakes in advance of the ceremony.
But he could not join the men who performed the ritual.