Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (14 page)

The Hopi were amused by the latest device to emerge from the worn wagon Curtis had
hauled to the high desert: a moving-picture machine. He set up the camera on the roof
of a house and captured the choreography of the last days of the Snake Dance. It had
been twenty-five years since young Ed Curtis canoed the waterways of Minnesota with
his father, the colicky preacher spouting evangelical Christianity, a faith that never
caught on with the boy. In the Hopi church of the outdoors, though, Curtis felt something
stir in his soul. “Hopi have become a spiritual crossroads in my work, a still place
in the middle of the continent,” he said. “These events are beyond words.”

His best work that year was with the Navajo, as he roamed over their 14,000-square-mile
reservation under the sandstone spires of northeast Arizona. Like many who spent time
with the Diné, Curtis was impressed by their silver and turquoise jewelry, their weaving
and their colorful sand paintings. “As the chief human touch of the great southwestern
desert, the Navajo are the artist’s joy,” Curtis wrote. He learned, by watching and
through translators, that most Navajo families lived in three homes: a summer residence
with a big garden; a stone house in a cliff above a wash, where freshets of water
were captured for irrigation; and a hogan, usually built of clay, rock, mud and reeds,
rounded at the edges. Polygamy was common, but women had superior property rights,
owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute—a powerful
incentive to stay married.

Threats to these domestic patterns came from federal agents, who were trying to dismantle
Diné culture in the name of promoting civilization, and from Catholic missionaries,
who were up to the same thing, though using a spiritual carrot instead of a government
stick. Defying the doubts of the Smithsonian authorities, Curtis learned enough about
the Yeibichai Dance to write up an explanation in his notebook, detailing what happened
on each of the ritual’s nine days. If only, Curtis mused at one point, the average
visitor could experience the sensation he felt after the sun went down in the Navajo
Nation: “There he is in touch with the stillness of the night under the starry sky
and sees before him, in this little spot lighted out of the limitless desert, this
strange ceremony of supplication and thanksgiving.”

The highlight was Canyon de Chelly. Like Acoma, this stone-walled cavity had known
human habitation for at least ten centuries. Though the valley floor was nearly six
thousand feet above sea level, the weather was moderate enough year-round to make
the canyon the garden spot of Navajo land, where rock, sun, wind, water and the ages
had produced one of the world’s singular places. A haunt of history hung over the
cinnamon-colored gash in the earth—those Anasazi, who had left so mysteriously in
the mid-1300s, their well-kept stone houses intact, and those charred stumps of the
once magnificent peach orchards that Kit Carson had burned to the ground when he starved
the Navajo into submission in 1864. Just as he had seen the hunched figure of old
Princess Angeline as an emblematic native of the land, Curtis saw the Navajo in sync
with Canyon de Chelly. On horseback, they were dwarfed by cliffs rising a thousand
feet above them and by a limitless empty sky. Being there, he understood why no one
had bothered the Navajo for so long. The canyon was impossible to see from afar; it
revealed itself only when you were actually upon it.

Curtis titled one picture
Sunset in Navajo Land,
another
Cañon de Chelly.
But a single long-view photogravure defined the entire Curtis enterprise:
Vanishing Race.
Seven Indians, perhaps of the same family, are on horseback, trailed by a dog, moving
across the canyon floor, no faces visible, a bare human and animal presence against
the monolithic rising walls. They appear tentative, on their way out, while the rock
is forever and immutable. The title served his theme, but was dishonest to the Diné.
No tribe in America, save perhaps the Sioux, had more people at the time, and no tribe
had a bigger land base for a reservation. Their isolation had been their salvation;
for centuries, no one else coveted the prickly ground they inhabited. And yet Curtis
feared for their future as much as he worried about the dwindling cadre of Havasupai
living near the Grand Canyon.

He shot more than six hundred photographs on that excursion. “My late trip to the
southwest has been a successful one,” Curtis wrote his friend Professor Meany, the
only man in Seattle who could appreciate the enormity of Curtis’s task. “In no former
trip have I accomplished so much in so short a time.” He dashed off a letter to Gifford
Pinchot, mindful of the possibility that the president’s confidant would pass the
words on to his boss in the White House. “One of the hardest trips that I have ever
made,” he wrote the forester, “met with more trouble from rains, accidents, that sort
of thing than I have in my work heretofore, but withal, succeeded in getting a very
large amount of splendid new material.” At home, he was given the kind of press adulation
reserved for expeditions to the North Pole.

A SEATTLE MAN’S TRIUMPH

Curtis’s ally and publisher Alden Blethen continued to be supportive, ordering up
multiple-page treatment for the photographer’s work, with six-column headlines such
as the one above. The local kid had shown those eastern elites. “And he went to Arizona,
and he stayed just long enough to accomplish that which Uncle Sam, with all his power
and authority, had tried for two decades to do and failed,” Blethen’s
Seattle Times
reported. Three times in 1904, the paper devoted full-page features to Curtis, displaying
his Canyon de Chelly pictures, referring to him in one headline as “Explorer, Clubman,
Photographer, Historian and President’s Friend.”

Of course, Curtis couldn’t help rubbing it in with the men of the Smithsonian, though
he tried to be diplomatic. He still hoped to win their backing, after all. “The longer
I work at this collection of pictures the more I feel of their great value,” he wrote
in late October to Frederick Webb Hodge, the most sympathetic of the Smithsonian’s
Indian experts. Hodge himself had been to many of the places in the Southwest that
had stoked Curtis’s passion. A year earlier, when the photographer had begun a correspondence
with Hodge, he tried to get him to see the inevitability of the Curtis design. “In
the beginning, I had no thought of making the series large enough to be of any value
in the future, but the thing has grown so that I now see its great possibilities,
and certainly nothing could be of much greater value. The only question now in my
mind is, will I be able to keep the thing long enough and steady work, as doing it
in a thorough way is enormously expensive.”

There was the nightmare—a sleep-destroying one at that. Curtis would soon be broke.
He had spent thousands of dollars of his own money, depleting what savings he had
and taking everything he could from the studio to finance four years with the Indians,
dating to the Blackfeet summer with Grinnell. What was coming out now as finished
photogravures could not begin to cover his costs. Meekly at first, and then more aggressively
as his situation worsened, he lobbied Meany to arrange a loan from his wealthy Seattle
friends, something to get him through another year or two of fieldwork. How much did
he need? Curtis equivocated, then arrived at $20,000. Such a figure. But Meany went
to work around town, capitalizing on the good press.

Clara was getting frantic. She did the books, and knew more than her husband that
they were headed for disaster. The months apart had nearly made them strangers to
each other. They now fought over Edward’s absences, over the direction of his work,
over child-rearing decisions and schools, and all the social events she had to reject
while her husband was feted by presidents and scholars. But mostly they fought over
money. It was his load to bear and hers to live. The partner who’d followed her love
across the sound at age seventeen, who’d spent many moonlit nights in alpine camps
with him, was losing her husband to something bigger than both of them.

Curtis had to find a benefactor soon, or the entire enterprise would fold just as
it was entering its most productive period. He wrote Merriam, Pinchot and Bird Grinnell,
his powerful allies in Washington. He wrote the National Geographic Society, the Washington
Academy of Science and the mogul who had given Curtis his first big break: railroad
titan E. H. Harriman. All were sympathetic, supportive and full of praise, some of
it over the top. Yes, they agreed, he was on to something masterful—keep at it! None
put up a dime.

Teddy Roosevelt was his last best hope. Curtis sent recent Indian pictures to the
president in December of 1904. A landslide election in November had kept T.R. in the
White House; he won 34 of 45 states over a hapless Democrat and a Prohibition Party
candidate with the unfortunate name of Silas Swallow. Two days after Christmas, Curtis
got a letter from the president—labeled “personal”—thanking him for the pictures and
praising the work, particularly one Navajo portrait. “Mrs. Roosevelt was as delighted
as I was with that remarkable Indian picture,” Teddy wrote. “My dear sir, how are
you able to do such work!”

How, indeed. Curtis was the toast of those who looked upon photography as an art form,
not an easy crowd to please, prone to mumbled pretentions and caustic insecurities.
This circle followed Alfred Stieglitz, the alpha male of sophisticated photography,
who had lavished praise on the Shadow Catcher. And Curtis was held in equally high
regard by those who saw in the emerging field of photojournalism an incalculable archival
tool. Like Curtis, the great portrait photographer of an earlier era, Mathew Brady,
had abandoned a prosperous private business framing faces of the famous in order to
document an American chapter, in his case the Civil War. Photography, Brady said,
could be “a great truthful medium of history,” but also like Curtis, he posed his
warriors in positions that suited his views. Curtis was old-fashioned in one sense,
sticking with cumbrous, fragile, heavyweight and dangerous glass-plate negatives when
easier ways to take a picture were available. But in other photographic realms he
embraced cutting-edge technology well ahead of his contemporaries. That same December
of 1904 Curtis rented out a large hall in Seattle and mesmerized the audience with
hand-colored lantern slides and moving pictures of Indians of the Southwest. The film
prompted members of the audience to jump from their seats in fear. The Portland
Oregonian
raved about the “New and Remarkable ‘Motion Pictures’ of Snake Dance and Other Mystic
Ceremonies.”

Alas, though Roosevelt could move trainloads of dirt and make water travel uphill
by building a canal in a pinch of Panama land that had bankrupted the French, the
imperious and strong-willed leader of the Western Hemisphere could not find someone
with enough money to keep the Curtis Indian project alive. What he did for Curtis
in the last days of 1904 was to connect the photographer with Francis Leupp, his commissioner
of Indian affairs. Leupp could give Curtis a pass to photograph many of the rituals
that Leupp’s Indian agents were trying to shut down. Curtis charmed him, and in short
order they were close. In the new year of 1905, Leupp invited Curtis to Washington
for Teddy’s inauguration in March. Many prominent American Indians—Geronimo of the
Apache among them—had been asked to lead a parade past the Capitol on the day Roosevelt
was sworn in.

Curtis rose from a short, sleepless night to greet the cold air of March 4, 1905,
Inauguration Day, in Washington, D.C. He was staying at the Cosmos Club, once the
Dolley Madison House, which had a reciprocal relationship with his own Rainier Club
in Seattle; he had done a show of his colored lantern slides for members earlier in
the week. He was barely into his second cup of coffee when a well-dressed older man
from the club approached him with a request.

“Mr. Curtis,” he said, “I would like to see an Indian and talk to him.”

That so,
Curtis mumbled.
What else was new?
It was the kind of request he got all the time, but especially in the East, where
he was often treated like a travel agent with a limited number of visas to the Indian
world. Curtis asked the man his business. He was a scholar—of Indian studies. But
like Karl May, that popular novelist of Indian stories, this expert had never made
eye contact with his subjects.

“I have written about the Indian for scientific magazines all my life and I have never
seen one. I would like to learn about their life and logic.”

Curtis stormed outside. Here he had spent more time with native people than any of
these so-called experts from the capital and he could not find a single financial
backer. Yet this man—he made his living writing about Indians and had never seen one.
He rushed off to the White House, where he had an appointment to photograph six tribal
leaders. Snow patches covered the lawn, and Curtis shivered as he set up his tripod
in an icy drizzle. The Indians who assembled on horseback wore feathered headdresses,
some trailing down to their ankles, and were not in much of a mood for prolonged posing.
The man in the middle, wrapped in a plain red army blanket, looked the most puckered
and least amused: Geronimo. Curtis had met the leader of the Chiricahua Apache a few
days earlier, at the Indian commissioner’s invitation. Geronimo was seventy-five,
and the fire had yet to leave his eyes. “The spirit of the Apache is not broken,”
Curtis wrote after spending time with him.

Born near the Gila River headwaters in New Mexico, Geronimo became a warrior after
his wife, three small children and mother were slaughtered by Mexican soldiers in
1858. He would fight Anglos and Latinos of various uniforms for the next twenty-eight
years, and take many wives. Among the Apache, though he was never a chief, he had
mythic standing: it was said he could walk without leaving tracks, and defy bullets,
injury and capture. He could make himself invisible. Near the end of his resistance,
chased by five thousand troops—one fourth of the standing army—his followers numbered
no more than thirty-six, for the raiding, nomadic Apache had many enemies, including
other bands of the same tribe. His surrender in 1886 marked the formal end of organized
military resistance by Indians to their conquerors.