Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (20 page)

That was easy enough. He gave credit to Roosevelt, Hodge and J. P. Morgan on the
title page. Myers, Phillips and Muhr were thanked inside. He noted that “the task”
had its inception in 1898. But enough explaining and thanking; no one cared how the
milk got to the porch. Once more—where to begin? So much to tell. So much to show.
As a distraction, Curtis dashed off a letter to his patron, without mentioning his
labor pains. “All goes well with the field work, and a year from now should see the
first volumes completed and off the press.” Oh, to be on the other side of the creation,
looking back. He added a statement of intent, just enough to give Morgan a flavor
of what was to come. The work would surely be “scientific” (that word again) but “not
dry,” as everything that came before it, by implication, had been. Was such a hybrid
even possible? Above all, as he had explained to Morgan at 23 Wall Street, his ambition
was to do something that might be worthy of display alongside the scribbled baubles
in the banker’s manuscript collection. Those literary treasures had just been moved
into Morgan’s new library, an interior space so stunning the London
Times
had called it “one of the wonders of the world” and compared him to Lorenzo the Magnificent,
the Medici benefactor.

Morgan had other things on his mind. He was preparing for a six-month trip to Europe,
a leisurely pursuit of some of the very Florentine masterpieces commissioned by Il
Magnifico himself. As he was set to go, the stock market tanked. It was nothing he
hadn’t seen before. After hitting a high of 103 in the early part of 1906, the Dow
Jones Industrial Average fell about 20 percent, and a recession knocked millions of
people out of work. A scheme by copper barons to control that market was collapsing,
forcing other commodity prices down. Morgan’s riches had been made on superb timing:
buy low in a panic, sell high in a bubble, look for efficiencies; why have two rail
companies operating a line to Buffalo when a consolidated single one would do? Morgan
had stakes in most of the troubled markets but, nearing his seventieth birthday, was
inclined to take the long view. He sailed for Europe.

Curtis started in again with the introduction for Volume I, his muse arriving at last
from the outdoors. “At the moment, I am seated by a beautiful brook that bounds through
the forests of Apache land. Numberless birds are singing their songs of life and love.
Within my reach lies a tree, felled only last night by a beaver . . .” That felt right:
the words, like the pictures, must spring from the earth itself. “Nature tells the
story,” he continued, the light from his candles receding, wax falling to the tent
floor. Though he would herewith record group histories, as one might explain Viking
clans and their many battles, the goal of this narrative of small nations was to tell
them from the point of view of the land and the Indian.

“It is thus near to Nature that much of the life of the Indian still is; hence its
story, rather than being replete with statistics of commercial conquest, is a record
of the Indian’s relations with and his dependence on the phenomena of the universe—the
trees and shrubs, the sun and stars, the lightning and rain—for these to him are animate
creatures. Even more than that, they are deified . . . While primarily a photographer,
I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be
told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.”

Snow forced the Curtis party indoors in the final days of 1906, a year when he had
been away from home for nine months. In the last few weeks of their fieldwork, the
team had gone to Montana and the Dakotas to hire translators, and then returned to
the Southwest for a tour up the Colorado River by primitive steamship, starting in
the Mojave Desert. That end-of-year sortie was an examination of small desert tribes
that would appear in Volume II—Pima, Papago, Yuma and related bands, scattered and
largely landless, but bound by life under a broiling sun. Some of the people looked
as desiccated to Curtis as a field that had not seen rain for months.

In Arizona at year’s end, Curtis rented a couple of boarding rooms and holed up with
Myers and Phillips for a winter of writing and sorting pictures. Away from saloons
and cities, restaurants and churches, sporting events and family dinner tables, the
Curtis party would have few distractions. “Not even our family knew our whereabouts,”
Curtis wrote to Morgan. The mail came a few times a week. Curtis cooked and went for
walks. They labored over language and images, filling out and refining Volume I, drafting
and sketching Volume II. Curtis was helped immensely by the economical prose that
Myers had picked up as a newspaperman in the factories of early-century journalism,
which allowed no room for writer’s block. Myers found the words when Curtis could
not. And he respected a deadline. When something was ready to be released from the
Arizona cloister, it was sent to Washington, where Frederick Webb Hodge edited and
vetted. The western crew worked for nearly three months, usually seventeen hours a
day, no time off, not even Sundays. After some debate between Curtis and Hodge over
how many of the crimes against Indians would be detailed, if at all, Curtis stuck
with his initial vow not to rehash the woeful history. Still, after seeing so much
of Indian country in decline, he could not resist a dig or two.

“Though the treatment accorded the Indians by those who lay claim to civilization
and Christianity has in many cases been worse than criminal, a rehearsal of those
wrongs does not properly find a place here,” he wrote in Volume I. He saved his loftiest
passages, as in his magazine journalism, for native spirituality. “Ever since the
days of Columbus the assertion has been made repeatedly that the Indian has no religion
and no code of ethics, chiefly for the reason that in his primitive state he recognizes
no supreme God. Yet the fact remains that no people have a more elaborate religious
system than our aborigines, and none are more devout in their performance of the duties
connected therewith. There is scarcely an act in the Indian’s life that does not involve
some ceremonial performance or is not in itself a religious act.”

Hodge loved the introduction, changing very little, but insisted on accuracy for things
such as accent marks and pronunciation guides. His many queries on small details sent
Myers shuffling through the field notes and audio recordings, and shooting questions
to academics who were willing to help. Approval also came from President Roosevelt,
editor without pay in the employ of Curtis. The president particularly liked the general
theme, which Curtis brought home in the final words of the introduction—a justification
for the manic pace of his life over the past nine years.

“The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge
of sacred rights possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be
gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one
of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be
lost for all time. It is this need that has inspired the present task.”

In New York, starting in the spring of 1907, Curtis went hat in hand to solicit subscriptions
from wealthy American institutions. He hated this drudgery—begging from the rich.
There was the question of his background. Where had he gone to school? Who was his
father? Are you sure Mr. Harriman will vouch for you? And just how involved is Mr.
Morgan? In Manhattan, he was not the Shadow Catcher cajoling snake handlers and looking
for faces in a storm. He was a salesman, a huckster of a grand history but huckster
nonetheless, expected eventually to sell a full five hundred subscriptions. To date,
he had commitments for only a few dozen. He needed $3,000 for each twenty-volume set,
exact publication dates to be determined later. That price, of course, was the low
end. But if the culture brokers shared his sense of urgency, as some of them said
they did, they did not extend it with their checkbooks. Time and again, the door was
closed in the photographer’s face with the same response: he had the backing of J. P.
Morgan, what more could he need? Let the world’s richest banker pay for everything,
as he had promised, yes?

It helped little to explain that Morgan’s money financed only the fieldwork. And even
that, it was already clear after less a year, would not be enough. A single month
in Arizona had cost Curtis more than $5,000. Worse, it was not a good time to persuade
the rich to unburden themselves with philanthropic ventures. Indians,
gad
—interesting, to a point. Stocks fell steadily through the first months of the year,
after a selloff in the previous quarter. Commodity markets continued to collapse.
Brokerage houses, having made speculative bets on margin, closed down. Interest rates
soared. The economy ground to a halt. It was, in the parlance of those episodes when
capitalism got very sick, very quickly, a panic. The one in 1907 was called the Bankers’
Panic.

“Things here in New York are strictly Hell,” Curtis wrote Professor Meany in Seattle,
“and what the future is to be no one seems to want to guess. The book building, however,
is moving along nicely.”

Curtis was already obsessing over the subject of the next volume: the Sioux. Big
parts of Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana had been shaped by the many bands of the
defiant Sioux, bison hunters and warriors who gave nothing to the easy-sketch historians
trying to romanticize them at century’s end. Curtis had started working with the Sioux
in 1905—“they got into my brain and I cannot shake it off.” While on the northern
plains, he had picked up a considerable amount of firsthand information about the
final battle of George Armstrong Custer. What he heard from the Indians did not match
the story that had made him a doomed hero among whites. The Sioux and the Crow—one
tribe attacking Custer’s men, the other serving as scouts for him—who had survived
the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 had valuable eyewitness accounts to impart.
Nobody had done an exhaustive retracing from the Indian view.

It had been while walking the Custer battleground in 1905, following in the steps
of those who took scalps and those who gave up scalps, that Curtis kept hearing of
a man, Alexander Upshaw, who had a strange hold on people in the region. A full-blooded
Crow, Upshaw was educated at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the
rough finishing institution for natives and the place where Curtis had first met Geronimo.
After his graduation in 1897, Upshaw was hired as a schoolteacher at the Indian school
in Genoa, Nebraska, but did not feel comfortable as a man of two worlds. Thereafter,
he never stayed long in a job; by his thirtieth birthday he was back among his people
on the Crow reservation in Montana, working uneven hours as a surveyor, translator,
rancher and tribal advocate.

The whites called him “lazy, dishonest, meddlesome, here today and there tomorrow,
a regular coyote,” as the Curtis aide Phillips remembered. They didn’t like Upshaw
because he spoke well, could argue the law and was a frequent witness in court cases
where the Crow were fending off speculators buying big pieces of Indian land in questionable
deals. Curtis and Phillips spent more than a week looking for him in that first year
among the people of the northern plains, hearing stories of “Upshaw the Terrible”
and “Upshaw the Renegade.” When at last they found Upshaw the Available, they put
him on the payroll. As Curtis prepared for the 1907 field season, he assigned Upshaw
to crack the Custer story, ordering him to get at what really happened, no matter
how it might conflict with the iconic version. At about the same time, Professor Meany,
who’d studied and written about Sioux history, agreed to come aboard for that part
of the project. Meany’s other task, hustling a subscription or two in Seattle, had
not gone well. He was embarrassed to report to Curtis that his school, the University
of Washington, had yet to commit itself to a full set. But not to worry, Meany assured
him, his brilliance would soon be known to all. Curtis remained troubled: American
appraisals always came with dollar signs. He would be a nobody if he went broke.

“It matters not how much good work I might do,” Curtis replied. “If I were out of
money I would be cursed for a fool and kicked from every door.” Even the one family
member who worked with him daily, the worshipful Phillips, had his doubts that Curtis
could do twenty volumes in five years, or ten, and still cover his bills.

“You are insanely optimistic!” Phillips told his boss in a fit of voice-elevated candor.

The nation’s attic, the Smithsonian, dealt another setback. Undeterred by the previous
rejection, Curtis had pressed a well-connected intermediary into asking yet again
for the stamp of the institution on the immense cataloguing and photographing of the
country’s first people. For a second time, the Smithsonian authorities said no, and
now they threw water on the scope of his work. “It appears that Mr. Curtis’s original
idea has become very much expanded,” wrote the secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles
Walcott. “As you are well aware, it will not do to claim too much for such a publication;
otherwise it will get the general condemnation of all interested in the subject.”
Curtis got the message: think small. Brown University, one of the prestige colleges
that Curtis had hoped would buy a full subscription, also snubbed him, after the school’s
resident Indian authority opposed the library’s acquisition. The expert, it seems,
had never heard of Curtis. They would regret it, Curtis vowed. “By the time I get
through with the Southwest country I will have so much to say that no library can
refuse us,” he wrote Hodge.

What lifted Curtis’s spirits and gave him a tailwind of confidence that lasted many
months was an endorsement from a much higher source: the president of the United States,
no slouch among scholars. His foreword to
The North American Indian
had arrived months before the unofficial deadline. The words from the White House
matched the image Curtis had of himself—produced without coaching or cajoling. Roosevelt
got it.
And Roosevelt got Curtis.