Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (24 page)

That story was not disputed. The military inquiry and several books and magazine accounts
had drawn out the details, although the extent of Reno’s alcoholism, and his inebriation
on the day of battle, was in question. It was always assumed that Custer knew nothing
of Reno’s debacle until it was too late, for he was out of sight. But the three Crow
scouts now told Edward Curtis a different story. They stood with the photographer
on a patch of ground surrounded by barking prairie dogs.
Look below,
they said, arms extended—here was an open view of the site of Reno’s full retreat.
Curtis estimated he was close enough that it was “almost within hailing distance.”
From here, the Crow scouts said, Custer had watched Reno’s company bleed and run.
What’s more, Custer dismounted and took in the carnage while sitting on the grass,
as if being entertained by blood theater, the Indians claimed. White Man Runs Him
said he begged Custer to intercede, scolding him for letting soldiers die. “No,” the
commander replied. “Let them fight. There will be plenty of fighting left for us to
do.”

That story was new, and potentially explosive. The conventional account had come
from the Indian scout Curley, because no one under Custer’s direct command had survived.
Curley, then nineteen, had fled a full hour before the battle. But White Man Runs
Him, Goes Ahead and Hairy Moccasins had stayed with Custer until just minutes before
battle, at which point they were allowed to make a dash for safety.

Curtis had brought with him a U.S. Geological Survey map, fresh off the press. He
was the first person to use this invaluable topographical aid as a way to understand
the sightlines of the combatants. At the viewpoint, White Man Runs Him told how Custer
was unmoved by the slaughter of his hated rival Reno. “Custer watched all of this
for 45 to 60 minutes,” Curtis wrote in his notes, “and the whole fight was so close
to him that he could have been in the thick of it in five minutes.” By this account,
Reno was a victim, Custer a coward—and a calculated one at that. “Reno’s effort was
truly pathetic, yet to have expected him, unsupported, to successfully meet the Sioux
was comparable to presuming to stop the flow of the Niagara by waving a wand,” Curtis
wrote in a rough draft. Had Custer charged, at a time when the Indians had yet to
fully assemble, the battle might have ended in victory for the Americans, or in a
draw.

Custer did eventually make his way toward the river, where, in the usual telling,
he was surprised by a mass of charging Indians, and there made his Last Stand. The
Little Bighorn was difficult to ford, the story had it, because of steep ground, another
reason why Custer couldn’t take the fight directly to the Indian camp. But Curtis
found that the riverbank was actually quite level at the place where Custer had tried
to cross, not a difficult ford. All of this information astounded Curtis. He told
Upshaw to question the scouts hard. Upshaw went over inconsistencies and repeated
his queries so many times that it brought ridicule from the Crow scouts. At one point,
Curtis held a knife to the sky; he could not make a mistake, he shouted—his life work
was on the line! The Indians touched the blade of the knife and looked upward, then
into the photographer’s eyes.

“All we have told you is the truth.”

This breakthrough would never have been possible without the fluency and persistence
of Upshaw, the Indian who served the Shadow Catcher longer than any other. At night,
lying on the ground under the high ceiling of a Montana sky, Upshaw and Phillips would
go over the day’s notes, talking at the orchestration of Curtis. They set up several
tents among the Indian tipis along the banks of the Little Bighorn. After having breakfast
at 7:30, they started work at 8, took a half hour for lunch and an hour for supper,
followed by work in the firelight until 1 a.m.—every day. Curtis considered Upshaw
an invaluable member of the team, praising him in letters, offering to help with his
government problems. But they fought over money. Curtis was late with payments, a
pattern that held for nearly everyone who did business with him. He could be imperious.
In that year, Curtis’s payroll had expanded to seventeen people at one point, heavy
with translators and wranglers, and including a close friend, Ed Meany, who was hired
to do research and write part of the Sioux story.

By late July of 1907, Curtis believed he knew more about the Battle of the Little
Bighorn than any man alive and was excited to release his findings. At around this
time, Upshaw had started drinking, and would disappear during binges. For almost a
decade, the Carlisle School had drilled into him the idea that it was wrong to resuscitate
stories of the Indian past. The language, war cries, ceremonies, spiritual offerings
to earthly elements, the face paint, the chants, the tiers of warrior prestige based
on scalping—all must be forgotten, the school taught, if Indians were going to prosper.
And now here was Upshaw, working for the world’s foremost project dedicated to the
task of preserving those same old ways. Worse, Upshaw could see the corrosive effect
on his people of a disaster in federal Indian policy. Following the Dawes Act of 1887,
the government tried to break up tribal holdings, giving Indians individual “allotments”
of their own land. In theory, this would make them property owners, each family with
a piece of ground to call its own, not unlike the philosophy behind the Homestead
Act. In practice, however, after twenty years it led to the reservations losing more
than half of the land they’d been promised by treaty. The new law was honey for the
bears of real estate predation.

Upshaw was married to a white woman from Ohio named Emma, and had three children
to support. When he went into town, in Billings, the whites mocked him for his marriage
and called Emma a traitor to her race. That summer, Upshaw decided to remain on the
Crow reservation and raise his family in a hybrid way. But when he tried to get his
wife adopted into the Crow Nation, he ran into trouble with his own people and their
government overlords. “I have concluded that it is not wise,” the federal Indian inspector
Z. Lewis Dalby wrote Upshaw in late July. Dalby had enormous power over the Crow;
he could make arrests, prosecute people and settle land disputes. And he despised
them. In his eyes, Crow women were “without virtue,” promiscuous, and the men “abominably
immoral.” To Upshaw’s earnest plea for help in bringing his white wife into the tribe,
the inspector was blunt. “No white person has ever been adopted into the tribe,” he
wrote. “Now, Alex, as you know I have taken a deep personal interest in you and I
do want to see you make good . . . You have behaved like a man, and I believe you
can see the foolishness as well as the meanness of your former course, and that you
now intend to straighten up and be a man. Mr. Curtis is your friend. Talk these things
over with him.” In essence, the educated Indian who had praised assimilation was told
he shouldn’t practice it.

In August, the Curtis party folded its summer camp along the Little Bighorn and trotted
back to Pine Ridge, a two-week journey on horseback. Curtis had nearly wrapped up
his investigation of the Custer story. He planned to check a few loose ends with the
Sioux and then walk the battlefield one more time in the fall with an army commander.
His time with the Sioux, in addition to the Custer story, was paying off with a rich
and varied collection of pictures. His camera caught them drying meat, praying to
the Great Mystery, assembling at his suggestion to reenact scenes of a war party about
to strike. He documented tipi construction, embroidery patterns of deerskin wardrobes
and the way young girls were taught to ride horses, lashed to the animals’ backs.
The portraits in particular—of Jack Red Cloud, Fast Elk, Crazy Thunder and American
Horse—conveyed the kind of inside knowledge that was characteristic of his best work.
The harrowing visage of Slow Bull’s wife, her eyes fixed in the caverns of an eroded
face, porcupine-quill earrings and necklaces flowing below, a whitewashed sky behind
her, could not have been captured by a stranger. Most of the faces, though, look gaunt—and
for good reason. When Curtis had first started working with the Sioux, in 1905, they
often went hungry. In the old days, an average Sioux would eat about six full buffalo
a year. Without these shaggy-headed beasts, they were dependent on handouts. “It is
doubtful in the history of the world that any people ever were brought so suddenly
to such a radical change in their manner of living,” Curtis wrote in his volume that
explained the tribe. “The enforced change in diet alone so undermined them physically
that they became an easy prey to every ill.”

When Curtis asked the Sioux if there was anything he could bring them in the future,
they answered with a single word: food.

Upon his return, Curtis had found the Sioux worse off, some near starvation because
government rations never appeared. Curtis arrived with a beef steer, fulfilling his
promise. He had expected a party of twenty. About three hundred showed up, milling
around, anxious and hollow-eyed. Negotiations were blunt and quick: the Indians would
work for Curtis, explain their customs and recall the warrior traditions, but they
had to be fed, and now. The Dakota plains, so full of buffalo during summer days past,
were a ghost prairie in 1907—an empty pantry. And at Pine Ridge Curtis saw a stark
replay of what had motivated the Sioux to go to war back in 1876. By treaty, they
had been promised nearly all of modern South Dakota, and hunting access to twenty-two
million acres in eastern Montana and North Dakota. But the treaty lasted no longer
than any other, a story Curtis had heard many times. Custer had guarded a railroad
survey into Sioux territory in 1873, a clear violation, and then led an expedition
to the Black Hills in 1874, the tribe’s sacred ground. When gold was discovered in
1875, Sioux land was overrun by prospectors. President Ulysses S. Grant demanded that
the Indians sell the Black Hills to the United States. After they refused to let go
of their homeland, the Sioux were ordered to cluster themselves at Pine Ridge and
await government food. Those who refused were considered to be at war and labeled
“hostiles.” That set the stage for the campaign of 1876 and the Battle of the Little
Bighorn. A bloody epilogue took place in 1890 at Wounded Knee, where the cold, gaunt
Sioux who had started to dream of the old life through the Ghost Dance revival were
gunned down by soldiers from the same Seventh Cavalry. Curtis heard that story one
day in all its murderous detail while he stared at the mass grave at Wounded Knee,
twenty miles from Pine Ridge.

Curtis could not find a buffalo to feed the Sioux if he used every dollar of J. P.
Morgan’s money. But with the help of Meany, his team rounded up at least one more
beef steer and was able to host a feast late in that summer of 1907. “Their hearts
were happy,” Meany wrote. “Old rites were re-enacted, old battles re-fought, old stories
re-told; and Mr. Curtis’s pen and camera recorded it all.”

Trouble now came from within the Curtis family. On the ride from Montana to Pine Ridge,
Hal had slumped in the saddle and almost fell off; he was not nearly as talkative
or observant as he’d been earlier in the summer. At night he appeared listless, without
an appetite, his brow warm to the touch. He complained of stomach pain and headaches.
Curtis picked up the pace, onward to his main camp at the Sioux reservation, dragging
Hal behind a horse in a makeshift carrier. At Pine Ridge, when the party arrived,
Clara was horrified at her boy’s appearance. She immediately took charge, setting
up a bed for Hal in a tent under the shade of a cottonwood. His fever hovered between
103 and 104. He still could not eat. She said it was typhoid fever, a disease caused
by a salmonella bacterium and often picked up from contaminated food or water; it
could be fatal. Curtis had taken his boy to many camps that summer, and food or drink
from a cowhand or a native helper might have spread the bacteria. Clara sent an Indian
to the nearest railroad track, twenty miles away, with instructions to stop a train
with an emergency request to get a prescription. After several days, medicine arrived
from Chicago. But Hal showed little improvement. His mother fed him prairie chicken
soup and applied wet compresses to his forehead. Curtis suspended all operations.

After several days, Curtis and Clara loaded Hal into a wagon and rode off to save
the boy’s life. Next to the rail tracks, Curtis flagged an eastbound train and brought
it to a halt. After negotiations over the fare, a makeshift bed was assembled from
two seats. Curtis stayed behind, watching the black smoke of the train shrink as it
made its way over the prairie. He heard, more than a week later, that Hal had regained
his health in Seattle, though he was still very thin. From then on, no child would
be allowed to join the Shadow Catcher in Indian country.

In the fall, the crew of Curtis, Myers, Upshaw and a college assistant settled into
a cabin on the Crow reservation. They planned to hole up through the winter, finishing
the Custer story for Volume III and working on a separate book on the Crow and the
Hidatsa, another northern plains tribe. A blush of gold held to the leaves, a last
glimmer of warmth. Then snow flew early, in mid-October, and would last for six months.
Winter on the high, lonely Montana plains would soon close in dark and deep, providing
ideal conditions for a team of wordsmiths and image makers trying to rewrite history.
Their cloister was a shelter of rough-hewn logs, snug against a huge rock embankment,
just a half day’s horse ride from the Little Bighorn battlefield. Inside was a large
fireplace and kitchen table. They worked from 8 a.m. to just past midnight, as Curtis
outlined in a letter to Belle da Costa Greene—“my only interruption being a single
trip to the post office, six miles away.” All other activity was restricted. “I permitted
mail, but no newspapers were allowed. Every thought and every moment had to be given
to the work.”