Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (2 page)

And that is where twenty-eight-year-old Edward Sherriff Curtis found Princess Angeline.
He knew
of
her, of course. Everyone did. Despite her ugliness—or, more likely, because of it—she
was the most famous person in Seattle, her image on china plates and other knickknacks
sold to visitors who flooded into Puget Sound as the weather warmed. A sketch of her
face once adorned the pages of the
New York Sun,
which hailed her as “the pet of the city.” If she was not the actual last Indian
of Seattle, people in town certainly treated her that way: her very existence served
as a living expression of how one way of life was far inferior to the other, and that
it was the natural order of things for these native people to pass on. Just look at
her.

“Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine!”

So said Chief Seattle himself in his famous treaty speech. Well, maybe not. His translator,
Dr. Henry A. Smith, was an eloquent fabulist, and only relayed these words many years
after the Duwamish tribal head had passed away, in 1866. But for the inheritors of
a moisture-kissed land so stunning it was hailed by the British explorer George Vancouver
in 1792 as “exhibiting everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw
into one point of view,” they expressed the prevailing sentiment. And so these haunted
words went into the chief’s mouth, the speech refined along the way as it was chiseled
into American history and twined to the city’s creation myth.

“Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.”

And:

“A few more moons, a few more winters and not one of the descendants of the mighty
hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes protected by the
Great Spirit will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and
hopeful than yours.”

And:

“These shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.”

When Curtis saw Angeline moving along the shore, the visible nearly dead, using that
cane of hers more like a blind woman trying to find her way than an old lady struggling
for balance, she looked at once like the perfect subject. There against the deep waters
of Puget Sound, there with the snow-mantled Olympic Mountains framed behind her, there
with the growl of earth-digging machines and the snorts of steamships and loading
crews and the clatter of streetcars and trolleys—with all of that, Curtis saw a moment
from a time before any white man had looked upon these shores. He saw a person and
nature, one and the same in his mind, as they belonged. A frozen image of a lost time:
he must take that picture before she passed.

Curtis had come bounding down the steep hill from the big house into which he had
just moved his ever-expanding family, at 413 Eighth Avenue. And what a vision of style,
manliness and ambition he presented. He was positively glowing as he moved, already
a master of the fastest-growing city in the American West. With his six-foot-two-inch
frame, he towered over Angeline. His Vandyke beard, his polished boots, his hat tipped
rakishly to one side, barely above the heavy-lidded eyes, made him look like a bit
of a dandy. There was style to his swagger. He had the kind of charisma that came
from a combination of looks, confidence and good luck. “He has a dreamy, sort of drawly
voice,” one male admirer wrote. “His blue eyes are sleepy ones with a half-subdued
air of humor lurking in their depths.”

But what the merchants who waved to him and bid him “Good morning, Mr. Curtis” and
the strangers who smiled warmly at the sleepy-eyed man in full did not know was how
much of his persona was forced, a creation young Curtis had forged in a remarkably
short period of time.

Yes, he owned the fancy studio downtown, six blocks from home, with a portrait-filled
parlor that alone was worth a visit. Yes, he was married to a gorgeous woman, dark-haired
and intelligent, with one child and a second on the way, and they shared that house
up the hill with his mother and other family members. And yes, the discerning
Argus,
well read in the region by the well fed, had pronounced Curtis and his partner the
leading photographers of Puget Sound a mere five years after Curtis mortgaged the
family homestead to buy into a picture shop. “One of the greatest examples of business
energy and perseverance to be found in Seattle today,” the paper said. If you had
any money and beauty, or desired both, it was de rigueur to pose for the master who
worked behind the standing lens at Curtis and Guptill, Photographers and Photoengravers.
The things they could do: the shadows, the painterly effects, the daring nudes (not
advertised)! It was portrait photography—art—a bit risky for its intimacy and far
ahead of the routine pictures that every family of means displayed in its drawing
room. The finished picture could be printed on a gold or silver plaque, a method that
was “original to Curtis and Guptill,” the
Argus
noted, “brilliant and beautiful beyond description.”

Curtis had developed a reputation for finding the true character of his subjects.
He did the civic leaders—Judge Thomas Burke, the progressive hero who had stood up
to a mob trying to force the Japanese out of Seattle by rifle and pitchfork. And the
Gilded Age rich—Samuel Hill, public gadfly and railroad man, who dreamed of building
a European castle on a bluff above the Columbia River. But he also captured the face
of the trolley car driver who had saved a month’s pay to sit before Curtis in his
spiffy uniform, of the sailor who planned his shore leave around a session in front
of the camera. He brought out the radiance of the young strivers, women of seventeen
convinced that a Curtis portrait was a passport to a better life. Visiting celebrities
were guided to the studio, there to be charmed by the tall, dashing young man with
the silk ribbon around his hat, smoking cigarettes between takes, constantly in motion,
in and out of the dark veil that cloaked his camera. In the manner of the instant
cities that looked out to the Pacific, Curtis had risen so quickly, had come from
so little to be so much. If only they knew. But this was the Far West, where a man’s
past, once it was discarded, buried or lost in a distant land, stayed that way.

What Angeline did to stay alive, the grubbing and foraging and digging and cutting,
was what Ed Curtis had done in his early years. Curtis had been the clam digger, up
to his knees in Puget Sound muck. Curtis had been the berry picker, his arms sliced
with surface cuts from rummaging through thorny thickets above the shore. Curtis had
scraped away at whatever he could find in the tidal flats, whatever could be felled
or milled or monetized to keep a family fed. He’d lived a subsistence life, his hands
a pair of blistered claws, his joints raw from the rock-moving and log-rolling, just
like the crone in the red scarf. His father was called, in the term of the day, dirt
poor. A Civil War private and army chaplain, Johnson A. Curtis was sickly and in foul
temper for much of the great conflict; after being discharged, he never found his
way or recovered his health. One thing he brought home from the dreary War Between
the States was a camera lens. Not a camera, just the lens. It sat for a dozen years,
untouched. Johnson Curtis married Ellen Sherriff, stern-faced and bushy-browed, started
a family—Edward was the second child of four, born near Whitewater, Wisconsin, on
February 16, 1868—and bounced around the rural hamlets of Le Sueur County, Minnesota,
trying to turn the ground for food or a soul for Jesus. He was miserable, a complete
failure. Ed Curtis supplemented the meager offerings at the family table with snapping
turtles and muskrats he caught in the creek; one made a soup, the other could be smoked
and eaten as a snack. It was never enough.

Education, sporadic at best, was in a one-room schoolhouse. The sickly father, when
he felt up to it, hit the road spreading Bible verses. The preacher took his boy along
on many of his ministry forays. They went by canoe, just as the Indians had done,
plying the waterways of still wild Minnesota. Ed learned to make a fire and cook a
meal out of whatever fish or salamander he could find or warm-blooded critter he could
shoot. The gothic Christianity of the United Brethren Church was not for him; it was
so joyless, so life-smothering with its rules and prohibitions. But the outdoors,
the open country—there was a church Ed Curtis could feel at home in. His formal schooling
ended in sixth grade. About the same time, at the age of twelve, he discovered his
father’s Civil War lens. Following instructions in
Wilson’s Photographics,
he built a camera consisting of two boxes, one inside the other. It was a primitive
device, but transformative and thrilling, for it could capture life in the marshes
of Minnesota and in the faces of family and friends. It made young Curtis feel like
something other than a mule.

When his oldest brother, Raphael, left the house, Curtis had to put the camera aside.
The preacher grew more sickly and useless. The fatal taint of the war had never left
him. At fourteen, Ed Curtis inherited a heavy burden: he would have to support the
whole family, including both parents. He got a job working for the railroad, rising
to become a supervisor. Because of his height, he looked much older than his actual
age. He killed muskrat and turtle still, brought more fish to the family table, tilled
a large garden, used his earnings for cloth and sugar and tobacco. The winter of 1886–87
nearly finished off the Curtis family. The preacher was bedridden during the cold
months, wailing and complaining. In the spring, the fledgling crops of the new season
died in a seizure of frost. The money from the rail job dried up after one of the
periodic panics that shut down the unregulated American economy. Broke, facing real
hunger and no future, the Curtis family was left with no option but to look west.

In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which
was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian,
and all of the British, claims to the region. Danes, Swedes and other Nordics were
flooding into Washington Territory, marveling at how the fjords and forests reminded
them of northern Europe. Irish and Germans came because of good word of mouth from
family members. But mostly, the fresh-starters were other midwesterners, leaving the
flatlands after the economic busts of the 1880s for another chance at a tabula rasa.
Here was Eden in the mist. “Bays within bays, inlets on inlets, seas linking seas—over
12,000 square miles of surface, the waters come and go, rise and fall, past a splendid
succession of islands, promontories, walls of forest and towering mountains,” a reporter
for the
Atlantic Monthly
wrote, describing perhaps the most primeval patch of temperate zone then under the
American flag. “The old Indian names which still haunt the shores heighten the illusion.
The wilderness is dominant still.”

That first winter for the Curtis homesteaders was wet but mild—the lows seldom falling
below freezing, snowfall a rarity even though the region is farther north in latitude
than Maine. The Curtis men claimed a piece of land across the water from Seattle,
near a town called Sydney. Their acreage was crowded with evergreens, alders and maples,
and sloped down to the sound. In the clearing, Ed Curtis could look out at tall ships
on the way to Seattle, Tacoma and Port Townsend, and could see what would become a
magnificent obsession—the 14,411-foot cone of Mount Rainier. From sea level to the
glacial top, Rainier was the highest freestanding mountain in the United States. Everywhere
Curtis turned, he took in a view dramatically unlike the Midwest. On one side were
the Olympics, which held their snow until midsummer, and on the other side were the
Cascades, the spine that ran down the entire midsection of the territory, dividing
it between a wet half and a dry. Water was the dominant element and master architect.
The green was all-encompassing.

Edward cut down spruce trees—light, straight, easily split softwood—on the family
claim and built a cabin with the timber. The centerpiece was a stone fireplace, which
heated the home fine. Fruit trees were planted. A big garden was established. The
rest of the family—a teenage girl Eva, the youngest boy Asahel and the preacher’s
wife Ellen—bundled up their belongings in the spring of 1888 and took the train out
west to join the men. But just as the light of May was bringing the land to life,
the old man took a turn for the worse. He had pneumonia when his family arrived, with
no appetite and no energy. The Reverend Johnson Curtis died three days after the reunion.

At age twenty, Ed Curtis took up where he had left off before the move, trying to
support the clan. He fished. The salmon were huge—big Chinooks weighed thirty pounds
or more—and millions of them flooded the waterways that emptied into Puget Sound;
all a man had to do was be minimally alert and modestly competent with net or pole.
He fixed things for hire, helping widows and disabled men with bent axles and faulty
stoves and broken plows. He picked berries. The orange ones, salmonberries, were the
most exotic; the purple ones, huckleberries, the tastiest, though he had to hike into
the foothills to get at them. He plucked oysters from the mud, dug clams, chipped
mussels from half-submerged logs. He cut wood, splitting firs and spruce for house-framing
purposes, and alder and maple for stove fuel. He aspired to fulfill his father’s dream
to open a brickyard. In a formal photograph taken not long after Reverend Curtis died,
Edward is the image of earnest ambition: clean-shaven, strong-jawed, a white tie against
a white shirt, looking resolute. But then his life came to a halt after he took a
terrible fall from a log, mangling his spine. At twenty-two he could barely walk,
let alone lift a beam or heft a bundle of bricks. Just like his father, Curtis was
confined to bed for almost a year, “limp, thin and bleached,” a neighbor boy recalled.