Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (26 page)

Upshaw was not only an interpreter without equal, but a strategist, helping to design
an approach to a given tribe, and a sounding board, not afraid to argue with Curtis.
When Upshaw left the winter writing cabin for a one-week translating job before a
grand jury, the entire operation nearly came to a halt, Curtis noted. He continued
to cut his hair short and dress in the clothes of the conquerors—the discipline of
trying to “be a man.” But this warrior’s son seldom got much respect for his effort.
The Indian inspector Dalby, who had told Upshaw he would not back his attempt to get
his white wife adopted by the Crow, monitored his behavior as if he were on parole.
Dalby’s admonitions burned inside him.

“I have read your letter through so often that I can repeat every word of it,” Upshaw
wrote Dalby. “As to my future, I have given you my sincere words when I promised I
will be a man.”

A man? He couldn’t go into Billings, a proper citizen window-shopping with his wife
and three children, without somebody sneering or shouting out at him. A man? He had
just helped to lead a highly successful scholarly expedition; he had been crucial
to the reconstruction of the Battle of the Little Bighorn; he had annotated and explicated
the story of his people; and yet he was still a red monkey in a white man’s shoes.
Once, he boarded a local train in Montana with Meany. The two men had just taken their
seats at the end of a long day when a cattleman, sitting nearby, started in on Upshaw.
He didn’t like Indians, he said loudly, and he didn’t like Upshaw sitting there. He
wanted him off the train. It wasn’t anything Upshaw hadn’t heard before, but usually
he got it for being with his white wife. Meany stood, towering over the cowboy, and
said Upshaw wasn’t going anywhere. At six foot four, with a wild thatch of red hair,
the professor could intimidate when he had to. The cowboy backed away. “I don’t think
I got the worse of the bout,” Meany wrote Curtis, “and I was glad to defend my Crow
friend.”

Upshaw’s father, Crazy Pend d’Oreille, was known for bravery against the Sioux, and
it was because of his family’s status that young Upshaw was plucked from Montana and
sent to the Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania for nine years. The institution’s
mission was to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Upon graduation from Carlisle, Upshaw
tried to fit the mold of a remade native. When rumors went out that Upshaw, while
visiting a western exhibition in Omaha, had taken part in a staged battle and was
dressed in tribal costume, he wrote a sharp rebuttal in the
Indian Helper,
the school paper. In fact, he’d been in suit and tie, his hair short, he insisted.
“Alex would have his schoolmates know that he is trying to be a man, though in the
midst of trials and tribulations.” Upshaw also tried to be an evangelical Christian,
and to organize a YMCA chapter at the Indian school where he taught in Nebraska. But
he didn’t last long at either effort.

With Upshaw as cultural guide, Curtis went deep into Apsaroke society. “Through him
I am getting into the heart of the Northern Plains Indian in a way that gives me the
greatest satisfaction,” he wrote Hodge. It showed in Volume IV, which became a much-cited
and consistently praised work of firsthand ethnology. Indeed, Hodge, who spoke from
authority, said the Crow volume “is the best story of Plains Indian life ever written.”
The people were described as physically robust—a woman could fell a horse with her
fist—healthy and confident. Their strength came in part from fighting other Indians;
they had enemies to the north in the Blackfeet, enemies to the east in the Sioux,
and enemies to the south in the Cheyenne. They roamed an area equal in size to New
England. With the bounty from the plains keeping them fed, they had time to spend
on decorative arts. “The nature of their life gave the Apsaroke a great deal of comparative
leisure,” Curtis wrote, “and they delighted in fashioning fine garments from skins
and embroidering them in striking colors.”

A young man trolling for women would ride on horseback nearly naked through a village,
singing, “I am merely staying on earth for a time; all women look upon me!” Along
with the words to that song, Curtis included the music, publishing a sheet with the
notes. Sex was celebrated. So, while Dalby said in 1908 that the Crow were “devoid
of any moral sense in connection with their sexual relations,” Curtis came away with
the opposite impression, writing at the same time. They are “certainly an unusually
sensual people,” he explained in Volume IV, but that did not mean they are “lax in
morals.” And in such digressions, a reader could almost hear Upshaw whispering in
the ear of the author: consider, Curtis told his readers, that an Indian may find
many customs in American society that are “highly objectionable and immoral.”

What fascinated Curtis about Upshaw, friend and subject, was his duality. It also
worried him. He could see the strain in a face turning harder by the day. As early
as 1905, Curtis could sense that inner conflict was gnawing away at Upshaw. Curtis
doubted that a “coat of educational whitewash,” as he called the years at Carlisle,
would be enough to cover the Indian in him. Not long after becoming Upshaw’s friend,
Curtis predicted that he would “die and go to the god of his fathers.” Upshaw drank,
though alcohol was outlawed on the reservation. He pushed back when a white man struck
him, though such a reaction could bring a felony assault charge. He was not submissive.
He used words that his neighbors had never heard—English words. “In some respects,
he is the most remarkable man I ever saw,” Curtis said in one interview. “He is perfectly
educated and absolutely uncivilized.” In that sense, Upshaw was the embodiment of
a first-rate mind, defined later in the century by F. Scott Fitzgerald—a man who could
hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still be able to function. Upshaw did
it one better: he lived two opposing lives.

The pictures in Volume IV also benefited from Upshaw’s access to Indian lives. The
people were photographed as if they were family members, with a closeness that comes
from long association. A Crow named Shot In The Hand is shown in high-relief profile,
his chin and nose like a ridge worn by the wind, mouth in tight grimace. His bronzed
head sits atop a mountain of dove-white quills, beading, animal skins and ornaments.
The main source of the Custer revisionism, White Man Runs Him, is displayed in an
unromantic close-up, with prominent facial scars. Portraits of Two Leggings, Wolf,
Red Wing, Fog In The Morning and Hoop In The Forehead provide a wealth of detail on
the jewelry worn by prominent men. Let Dalby and the Bureau of Indian Affairs insist
that the Crow strip themselves of the ancient trappings of class and privilege; in
the Curtis portfolio, that glory had one more showing. From the field came winter
scenes, shot not far from the writing cabin, like a woman carrying a bundle of twigs
to an ice-wrapped tipi, trudging through an expanse of snow—the photographic equivalent
of a Tolstoy description of a peasant. And Curtis also included, in the plates of
Volume IV, a portrait of Upshaw himself, who was thanked in the introduction. The
picture, titled simply
Upshaw—Apsaroke,
displays a face that is somewhat mournful, the eyes liquid, as if he were close to
tears. Upshaw leans on his right elbow, a traditional pose. Most revealing, he wears
a head bonnet, fourteen rows of shell necklaces and long hooped earrings, and he’s
shirtless. This Upshaw is an Indian like his father, not someone else’s definition
of a man.

In the summer of 1908, Curtis sent Upshaw to the Dakota north country, along the
high, wind-lashed banks of the Missouri River, to start building relations with the
Mandan. This tribe had been instrumental in keeping the Lewis and Clark expedition
alive, providing them winter quarters in their big earthen lodges, showing them how
to find food and comfort in one of the coldest places on the plains. It was at the
Mandan winter camp that Sacagawea, a Shoshone slave, was won in a gambling contest
by an American member of the expedition. The artist George Catlin spent considerable
time with the Mandan in 1833, trying to capture on canvas what Curtis was now doing
with glass plates. A smallpox epidemic nearly wiped out the tribe; a count in 1837
found only 137 people. For survival, they joined forces with two other groups, the
Arikara and Hidatsa. Their reservation, originally eight million acres by treaty,
was being whittled down to less than a million acres when the Curtis party arrived.

As before, Upshaw was able to work his way deep into the community, and after two
months he reported back to Curtis on a variety of good subjects. Curtis shot the Arikara
medicine ceremony, adults with full-sized bear skins draped over themselves, the resulting
pictures as animated as anything in the entire
North American Indian.
The men were trying to assume some of the strength of a bear, and the animal’s spiritual
power, as part of a larger prayer offering for rain and food. To the Arikara, all
animals had souls, though trees and stones were inanimate. “This remarkable ceremony
of the medicine fraternity of the Arikara has long been dormant,” Curtis wrote, “the
agency officials having suppressed it about 1885.” He had arranged for “remnants of
the fraternity” of bear medicine men to perform the outlawed ritual.

Curtis also took pictures of men offering buffalo skulls to the sky, and of women
gathering berries, and he learned that the punishment for a man who committed adultery
was to have one of his horses shot. The most memorable portrait was of Bear’s Belly,
who wears a full skin, with the bear’s snout on his head and the arms, legs and back
of the animal’s thick hide covering his own. His face and the upper part of his chest
are open to the camera; he looks like a northern plains version of a centaur—half
bear, half man.

The real prize, Upshaw told Curtis, was something less flashy: the small, sacred
turtle drum of the Mandan, “the object of greatest veneration.” Upshaw befriended
the priest who kept the effigies, a pair of buffalo-skin-wrapped drums in the shape
of turtles. It would severely upset the Mandan, the translator said, should Curtis
press for access. “The Mandans asserted that no white man had ever touched or had
more than a possible glimpse of them,” Curtis wrote in his notes of the visit. “Naturally
this intrigued me.” The guardian of the turtles was a man named Packs Wolf, who lived
away from the main tribe in a log cabin. For several days, Upshaw went to see him,
returning with the same news: the turtles were off-limits. Upshaw upped the payment
offer. Negotiations continued. Finally, after a high fee was agreed to, permission
was granted. It felt sneaky, somewhat dirty, money for spiritual access. Curtis knew
such an unveiling would be “an unethical affair,” as he wrote, but such were the unseemly
methods of field anthropology.

On a chilly morning, Curtis and Upshaw went to Packs Wolf’s cabin. “It was made clear
to me this business was being done without permission of the tribe,” Curtis wrote,
and if others found out, “dire things could happen to all of us.” Curtis and Upshaw
were told to strip in preparation for a purifying ritual in the sweat lodge. They
could not enter the House of the Turtles without first cleansing themselves, Packs
Wolf explained. They spent the better part of a day inside a dome-shaped willow lodge
with a pit of hot rocks in the middle. As sweat poured out and steam rose from their
skin, Upshaw thought Curtis would pass out. Not to worry, the photographer said: he’d
been through many a sweat bath and knew what to expect. The next day, they were ushered
into the turtle domain, a log house dimly lit by two small windows. The priest brought
out two objects, tightly wrapped in buffalo skin with an outer layer of feathers.
Curtis wanted to peel away the feathers to see the turtles. A fresh round of negotiations
ensued, with Upshaw again doing the bargaining for his boss. Curtis was vague in his
account of what happened next. He wrote in Volume V that “unexpected permission was
granted to photograph them without the feathers.” He was ordered not to turn the turtles
over—“if you do all people will die.” Curtis, his nerves unsteady, trembled as he
made several exposures. Outside the cabin, a group of Mandan on horseback approached.
The turtle temple had been violated. No, no, the Indians were told, the Curtis party
had only been discussing turtle lore—no pictures had been taken.

Later, Curtis felt triumphant. “I am more than happy to tell you that we actually
got our hands on the sacred turtle of the Mandans and secured pictures of them,” he
wrote Meany from Minot, North Dakota. The finished picture,
The Sacred Turtles,
shows two small, quite ordinary objects of tightly stitched buffalo skin in afternoon
light on the floor. Their power, of course, was in what they represented—spirits harnessed
from all over the Dakotas. In rationalizing his actions, Curtis said, “Fortunately,
taking a picture leaves no mark.” But it may have left a mark on Upshaw, acting as
the agent of betrayal of fellow Indians.

Throughout 1908, the first volumes of the Curtis magnum opus came under critical scrutiny
from high places in Europe and the United States. Curtis had steeled himself, expecting
to take a few hits. They never understood him, the culture czars. They were jealous.
His work showed how lazy they had been in their thinking, how so many of their ideas
were nonsense. He wrote Hodge of one snub by a “Doctor Cullen,” from an institute
in Brooklyn, who had declined to purchase a subscription. The learned man didn’t like
the photographer because of “my failing to comprehend his personal deification,” Curtis
explained to Hodge. “On seeing him in the lobby of a Portland hotel I stepped up to
his Highness and laid my profane hand on his shoulder and spoke to him with the familiarity
of an equal.” But Curtis’s defensiveness was unnecessary—the latest reviews were stunning.