Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (21 page)

The president was not much of a stylist, despite having published nearly twenty books
by his fortieth birthday. He repeated words and phrases, a habit used in speechmaking
that often found its way into writings that called for more subtlety. And, as he frequently
contributed to journals, he could be thick with the insider jargon. The foreword,
a spare 350 words or so, was none of that:

In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are pictures,
not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is
truthful. All serious students are to be congratulated because he is putting his work
in permanent form; for our generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis
has done. The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His
life has been lived under conditions through which our own race passed so many ages
ago that not a vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable calamity if
a vivid and truthful record of these conditions were not kept. No one man alone could
preserve such a record in complete form. Others have worked in the past, and are working
in the present, to preserve parts of the record; but Mr. Curtis, because of the singular
combination of his qualities with which he has been blest, and because of his extraordinary
success in making and using his opportunities, has been able to do what no other man
has ever done; what, as far as we can see, no other man could do. He is an artist
who works out of doors and not in the closet. He is a close observer, whose qualities
of mind and body fit him to make his observations out in the field, surrounded by
the wild life he commemorates. He has lived on intimate terms with many different
tribes of the mountains and the plains. He knows them as they hunt, as they travel,
as they go about their various avocations on the march and in the camp. He knows their
medicine men and their sorcerers, their chiefs and warriors, their young men and maidens.
He has not only seen their vigorous outward existence, but has caught glimpses, such
as few white men ever catch, into that strange spiritual and mental life of theirs;
from whose innermost recesses all white men are forever barred. Mr. Curtis in publishing
this book is rendering a real and great service; a service not only to our own people,
but to the world of scholarship everywhere.

Some would quibble with, even condemn, the cultural superiority inherent in Roosevelt’s
take: the poor Indians, living as whites once did during a long-ago primitive age,
are passing away, and as they go, they remain unknowable, with “that strange spiritual
and mental life of theirs.” But for an understanding of the value of the work, the
foreword could not have been better had Curtis written it himself. The president had
called him an artist, an outdoorsman, a visionary; he hailed the scholarly depth—
take that, you bastards at the Smithsonian and Brown!
—and its significance to a nation that was in the habit of erasing its past.

The picture-making, just like the picture-taking, left something to chance. In his
studio, working with the fast-fingered Adolph Muhr, Curtis would throw together a
brew of developing chemicals in the same way that a winemaker would blend different
grapes to bring out tannins and flavors. Deep in a day, he often lost track of what
parts had gone into a particular blend. “I have almost forgotten that they are an
essential part of photography,” he told a college class. “For every negative that
is a disappointment, there is one that is a joy.” He refined an image, trying to bring
more light or shade, to frame smaller or larger, to blur a certain face or show its
every crag, to burn a halo effect behind a head or darken a background. In Seattle,
they toned, printed, engraved, “night after night until the last cable car jangled
its call as it slid down the hill to its terminus,” said Phillips. Muhr was no rubber
stamp, but he was in thrall to the work, and brought others in to make it even better.
He hired a woman just out of the University of Washington, Imogen Cunningham, and
she wasted no time testing the limits of this emerging art form. In college she had
majored in chemistry, then traveled to Germany to study photography. Cunningham, like
Curtis, loved to dare and shock; she had taken photographs of nude subjects at Mount
Rainier, and explored dream states and subconscious themes in her prints. She saw
in Curtis someone on par with the mighty Stieglitz, who had formed the Photo-Secession
group to promote the artistic merits of photography. Stieglitz and his followers used
darkroom techniques to soften a subject, or blur an image in a reach for abstraction.
Curtis had been doing that since he started his studio work, and his lens was often
little more than an opaque veil. Many a viewer perceived painterly metaphors and objects
freighted with symbolism. “And the photographs themselves, quite apart from their
historic and scientific value, show a fresh, far step in the progress of photography
into the realm of fine arts,” wrote a reviewer in the
Craftsman.
“Mr. Curtis has so far improved on old methods of printing and finishing as to have
practically invented processes in photographic presentation. His tones, his rough
surfaced papers, his color combinations are a new art, or a new science.” Curtis dismissed
talk from the avant-garde with his oft-stated goal: he wanted people to see human
beings in the faces of Indians, and he wanted those faces to live forever.

The first pictures selected for
The North American Indian
implied that the only way Indians would find eternal life was through a Curtis lens.
Of course, this would boost the value of his pictures—wishful thinking with a profit
motive. In the studio, looking for the picture that was emblematic of his theme, Curtis
returned to an image he had taken while wandering in Canyon de Chelly in 1904. Then,
he had shot several ground-level stills of a few natives on horseback moving away
from the camera—a retreat, with one person looking back, as in a last glance at a
homeland. Curtis had deliberately underexposed it in the field, to give it a bit of
a gauzy blur. But back in Seattle, making the print for Volume I, he wasn’t satisfied
with the light. He and Muhr stayed up all night experimenting with exposures and tones,
using different chemical batches. One was too dark. The other too refined. One looked
phony, polished. The other too removed. One had too much detail, the frame cluttered.
Another was too gauzy. Curtis wanted a sprinkling of sunlight coming off the backs
of people as they moved away, but not show so much that it might draw the eye away
from the main image. The Indians traveled toward a mesa, or a mountain range; it was
too dark to make it out, distant and blurred. By dawn’s break, the heavy lifting in
the studio was over:
Vanishing Race
would be the curtain raiser in the separate portfolio of photogravures that accompanied
the bound text and pictures of Volume I. Curtis offered this caption: “The thought
which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn
of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the
darkness of an unknown future.” In a letter to a friend in Seattle, he called it “a
touching melancholy poem.”

The second picture chosen for the portfolio was the side-view profile of Geronimo,
which countered the soft-focus valedictory of
Vanishing Race
with defiance. It was meant to be a taunting eulogy, not unlike Chief Seattle’s imagined
words, “Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.”
And Geronimo’s portrait validated the self-image of Americans who had pressed farms,
villages and great iron cities into pastoral pockets of the former Indian homeland:
the decline of one people was inevitable, no matter how many virtues were being discovered
on the deathbed.

Within the smooth-textured leather binding of Volume I were pictures that were less
gloomy, though still intended to trouble the mind. Curtis opened with
The Pool—Apache,
a visual complement to his words defining people through nature. A nearly naked man,
hair falling well below his shoulders, stands barefoot on rocks at the edge of a calm
river. The water is a mirror, and the countryside is lush. The Apache man appears
to be deep in thought. Throughout the rest of the book, water is a repeat motif. Curtis
fought with Hodge over whether to include several nudes, which he believed could best
illustrate tribal myths, dreams and stories. Curtis insisted that the way to explain
a part of the Indian inner world was “to make the most of the nudes.” But Hodge, perhaps
fearing a censorious reaction from buttoned-down colleagues, prevailed: in the end,
only partial nudes were included.

The facial close-ups, with Curtis the portrait photographer at the top of his game,
are less affected, and in an odd way more natural and journalistic, from the infant
with bright cheeks,
An Apache Babe,
to
Escadi,
an Apache headman. His portrait of Alchise, bare-chested and leaning against a tree,
shows a fifty-five-year-old man who has lived many lives. In the long shots, the land
dwarfs the humans.
A Hilltop Camp—Jicarilla
provides a sense of what it’s like to reside on a bluff when a mountain storm approaches.
But it is with the pictures of the Navajo that the oversized rock backdrops play a
starring role.
Cañon de Chelly
and
Cañon del Muerto
are mash-ups of sky, sandstone and mountain flanks, predating Ansel Adams with their
shadow work and textural detail.
Sunset in Navajo-Land
is a black-and-white composition put to dramatic effect without being too precious.
Women of the Desert
makes everyday heroes of the Navajo mothers who tend flocks of sheep over stubby
land that dares people to scratch a living from it. Other Navajos are fully masked,
the camera catching the contrast between muscled torso and wildlife-animated facial
hoods. The religious rituals that Curtis was so proud of capturing are presented like
trophies: the
Apache Medicine Man
leans over what appears to be the sacred buckskin creation chart, and
Yeibichai Sweat
is the precursor to the Navajo ceremony that the men of the Smithsonian said could
never be photographed.

Curtis wrote the text as if he had just returned from a visit to Homer’s Greece,
attempting to explain nations and their mythic stories, complete with a translation
guide to languages not taught in American schools. As with the ancient Greeks and
Romans, he wrote, the Indians have “a deity for every occasion and hour.” He divided
the book into sections on tribal history, home life, mythology and interpretations
of certain ceremonies. He didn’t just summarize a particular myth of, say, the origin
of fire, but wrote exhaustive essays on the subjects. The story of Goshonné took up
two pages. Marriage between related families was strictly prohibited, he wrote, and
“it kept their blood at the very best.” Men who had two wives, a common practice,
made sure the women lived far apart from each other. He talked about the Apache sense
of humor—pranks, practical jokes, gut-busting laugh sessions. “Surely, he who says
the American Indian is morose, stolid and devoid of humor never knew him in the intimacy
of his own home.”

The Apache reputation for being “wild” came about largely because they had been nomadic
and had developed raiding into an economic skill. He tried to counter the stereotype,
again, with an appreciation of their spiritual life: “Nothing could be more logical
and beautiful than many of their prayers and songs.”

The various diets were explained, the food ranging from grapes and piñon nuts to
deer and chipmunk. So were the Indians’ sex lives and property rights, and the role
of women, children and the elderly. Perhaps most astonishing, for a man who by trade
was a studio photographer, was his lengthy appendix of the different Athapaskan dialects
among the Southwest tribes. With considerable help from Myers, he wrote up a comparative
chart showing the English, Apache, Jicarilla and Navajo pronunciations for a given
word.

He labored throughout with the meaning of “savage” and “primitive,” words used by
even the most sympathetic of early-twentieth-century anthropologists to describe Indians.
“There are two sides to the story and in these volumes such questions must be treated
with impartiality,” he wrote. In this struggle, Curtis went back and forth with the
Crow translator in his crew, Alexander Upshaw, who clearly influenced him. Upshaw
was conflicted throughout his life. In a picture at the Carlisle Indian School, he
wears a dress shirt and pressed pants, with his hair cut short and parted in the middle,
the very image of assimilation. He also wrote an essay for the school newspaper arguing
the merits of giving up the old ways and learning to live like a white, titled “What
the Indians Owe to the United States Government.” But once he moved back home and
went to work for Curtis, Upshaw took up the cause of tribal rights; he seemed to “return
to the blanket,” as Phillips described it. He posed without a shirt and in a head
bonnet. He fought with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, even when he worked for it.

As Curtis went over his notes one night in Montana, not long after hiring Upshaw,
the conversation moved to the idea of an “educated Indian” compared with those who
refused schooling. A government agent who sat with them, as federal interlopers often
did when trying to keep an eye on Curtis, asked the Crow interpreter why his people
didn’t show much of an American work ethic. Upshaw rose, pointing to a row of buffalo
skulls lining a cabin shelf.

“They tell you why,” he said. “While those buffaloes were alive we did not need to
work. Only niggers and white people farmed. We were a superior people and had nothing
but contempt for those who worked.” The government man mumbled something about other
tribal members who had successfully taken up the hoe and the merchant’s life. “Do
you expect us in the fraction of a lifetime, in the quarter of the age of an old man,
to have changed our whole life, and even to have forgotten the days of the old freedom,
when we were lords of all the great plains and mountains?” said Upshaw. “In what way
does your civilization benefit us? Before you had attempted to force your so-called
civilization upon us we had every desire of the heart!” Curtis took Upshaw’s side
of the argument, but the translator wasn’t through. “What has your civilization done
for us? Robbed us of our land, our strength, our dignity, our content. Even your religion
has robbed us of our confidence in the hereafter.”