Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (28 page)

Celilo Falls hosted a trade mart as well—an open-air exchange in a desert surrounded
by snow-hooded volcanoes. Inland tribes arrived with bison skins and elk hides and
teeth; coastal dwellers came with jewelry made of surf-polished seashells. Curtis
was in his element shooting the Columbia tribes in their element—the Walla Walla,
the Umatilla, the Cayuse and various smaller Chinook bands, doing what they had done
for centuries. He framed men with thick forearms spearing salmon. He captured teenage
boys leaning over platforms, rickety-looking contraptions that hung above the swirling
Columbia, scooping fish from white water with their long-handled dip nets. He did
not have to stage these scenes, as he did when he asked the Sioux to reassemble a
war party, or when he requested that an old chief put on his eagle-feathered bonnet
one more time for posterity. But he knew these pictures would soon have historical
value. There was talk among the merchants and boosters of the fast-growing communities
of the interior Northwest of damming the Columbia, though it seemed preposterous that
anything could tame such a torrent.

His task on this spring day was simply to make it down a drop of eighty feet, as the
Corps of Discovery had done in 1805, without getting killed. He and his crew hauled
the boat out of the water and onto a single flatcar on a rusty length of rail track
parallel to the falls. This track led to a cauldron below. The plan was to lower the
launch, using ropes to slow its descent, and try to make a soft enough landing in
the water that the boat would not be crushed. Waist-deep in the Columbia at the head
of Celilo, Curtis barked at his men through the spray.

“The roar of the falls was so great they could not hear my calls for instruction,”
he wrote. He waded to shore, shouting out a plan of action. Noggie would have none
of it; the cook sat on a rock, head in hands, sobbing.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I know you will drown,” Noggie said. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “I know you
will drown!”

Curtis wanted to slap him. He had no time for this crap. His crew had thinned considerably.
He couldn’t pay Bill Phillips, now absent. And his cousin-in-law had fallen in love,
and showed less interest in The Cause. Upshaw was dead, and God, how he missed him.
Bill Myers, who had taken on more of the writing duties in addition to his fieldwork,
was still with him, of course. The new hire, Schwinke, the son of German immigrants,
was getting his first tryout as a field stenographer. He was just twenty-two and willing
to work cheap. Meany was back at the University of Washington, a much-loved professor
in his pulpit, dazzling young minds at a school that had grown overnight into a sprawling
campus of Gothic towers, limestone monuments and bug-eyed gargoyles staring out toward
Mount Rainier. This expansion had come about because the university had been the site
of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s coming-out party. Holding a
world’s fair at a university that then had only three buildings and was surrounded
by an old-growth forest was Meany’s idea. The fair was a success beyond the wildest
projections. The Olmsted brothers, the designer sons of the man who drew up New York’s
Central Park, had been hired to frame the exposition. By the time the fair ended in
October, 3.7 million visitors had come to the nation’s far corner for a look. Curtis
had a prominent place at the exposition grounds; the five printed volumes of
The North American Indian
were given trophy display. This marked the first time that people in Curtis’s hometown
could see an extensive layout of what their famous resident had produced.

“You will drown!” Noggie started in again. Curtis forced his will on the crew, and
with careful guidance they lowered their boat down the edge of the falls, its sides
slapped by water. The skiff crash-landed at track’s end, but remained intact. They
were at the point where the river was pinched by high basalt cliffs, squeezing into
the narrowest, most powerful hold—a doubling, at least, of hydraulic power. And they
had eight more miles to go, though no other section would be as steep as Celilo Falls.
Still, Curtis showed no fear, no panic. To be out in the wild again, breathing air
that whistled through the Columbia Gorge, was a tonic for a tired forty-two-year-old
man. Unbound, he was always in a better mood.

The year had been clouded by problems on many fronts, despite his international celebrity.
All winter, Curtis had been cooped up in a new writer’s cabin, across Puget Sound
from Seattle, on the Olympic Peninsula, not far from the little piece of ground the
Curtis family had homesteaded in 1887. The retreat was near a village called Waterman,
and it was aptly named, for it rained, or threatened to rain, nearly every day. Once
again the confinement—in this case, low clouds and steady squalls—was ideal.

“We are entirely shut off from the world,” he wrote his editor Hodge. “Our camp is
certainly as cheerful as one could wish in this weather, which is the sort well-adapted
to ducks.” He refused to let newspapers in, and allowed only one mail delivery a week—the
same regimen he’d enforced in Montana. For breaks they took walks in the mist. With
Myers fact-checking and assisting with big portions of the writing, Curtis worked
that wet winter through all of Volumes VI and VII and the first part of VIII. He was
trying to cover a tremendous amount of ground: the Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Arapaho
in Volume VI, which closed out the northern plains; the Yakima, Klickitat, Interior
Salish and Kutenai in the next volume, taking in many of Washington State’s dry-side
Indians; and the Nez Perce, Walla Walla, Umatilla, Cayuse and Chinook, from the Columbia
region. Much of this material came from earlier Curtis forays. One of the main writing
challenges was how to present the Nez Perce, Chief Joseph’s people. Curtis was especially
fond of them, dating to his football weekend in Seattle with the aging tribal leader.
He felt bitterness at their treatment. He had pored over the events leading up to
the Nez Perce War of 1877, and knew he had as much new to say on this subject as he
did on Custer. But he chafed at the restraint of trying to tell a straightforward
history, bound by his own published promise in the introduction not to revisit injustices.
When he stared at the picture of Chief Joseph—those eyes!—he could feel a bit of the
ache from the old man’s heart.

His sentiment had been evident in the section on the Cheyenne, in the draft of Volume
VI. Along with the Sioux and the Apache, they were the last nation to be placed on
a reservation, and their holdout had clearly won over Curtis. He called the land given
to the Northern Cheyenne in southeast Montana “a small and discouragingly sterile
reservation” and described their treaty as “a delightful bit of satire.” In that pact,
the Indians were allowed to homestead on ground that had once been theirs. In his
Return of the Scouts
and
Before the Final Journey
he showed the Cheyenne mounted, at full gallop. For an additional boost of pride,
his best portrait from the Cheyenne is a warrior—
Two Moons,
one of the veterans who defeated Custer. He wrote up sheet music, including “A War
Song of the Dog Men,” sung by a special breed of Cheyenne soldiers.

At times, Curtis slipped out of the writers’ roost to work with Muhr in the Seattle
studio. His many days with the Piegan and Blackfeet had paid off with a wealth of
material for Volume VI. But one picture troubled him. It showed Little Plume and his
son Yellow Kidney, with their high foreheads and prominent braids, sitting in a buffalo-skin
tipi stuffed with everyday objects. Right between them, on the earthen floor, is a
more prosaic accessory—an alarm clock. How had Curtis missed this? He agonized. It
was a revealing photo, as he said in his caption later, “full of suggestions of the
various Indian activities.” But could those activities include a device for getting
up early, perhaps for a tedious job somewhere? He had Muhr retouch the photo, removing
the alarm clock—one of the most significant of his manipulations of a picture. Happy
with the finished product, Curtis returned to the writing camp.

At the cabin, Curtis was closer, geographically, than he’d been to Clara for some
time, barely twenty miles across the sound. But the two were more emotionally distant
than ever before. Their only son had recovered from the typhoid fever that nearly
killed him, but the family was shattered. Hal went east, to a boarding school in Connecticut,
courtesy of a wealthy Curtis benefactor. “I never came home because there wasn’t really
a home after that,” he said later. Clara had started to withdraw from the family,
perhaps as protection for her own pain, and spent more and more of her free time with
Nellie, her sister and confidante. At the age of thirty-five, Clara had given birth
to a daughter—their fourth child, Katherine—on July 28, 1909. The baby was the last
trace of intimacy between Edward and Clara. By 1910, their marriage was a sham, irrevocably
broken, though no divorce proceedings were started. Clara kept the house, with sole
parenting duties over the three children at home, and still managed the studio.

Curtis moved into the Rainier Club, in its fancy new downtown digs on Fourth Avenue—a
Kirtland Cutter design inspired by Jacobean manor houses of England. Thereafter, he
listed the club as his home address. It was the finest dining and gentlemen’s parlor
in the city, but it was not free. Curtis was broke, as usual. So the club made a deal:
he could stay there, in a small room upstairs, with full privileges, but would have
to work for his keep. How so? Pictures, what else? And so the most famous portrait
photographer in America entered a long period of indentured servitude to the Rainier
Club, taking customary Curtis portraits of the members—with the soft lighting, the
finished photogravure touches, the fishhook signature that was his brand but often
did not come from his actual hand—in return for room and board. He also gave the club
Indian pictures to pay the rent, including many of his masterpieces. With every prolonged
stay, the Rainier Club added to its collection, becoming in time a museum of sorts
to a destitute member.

While he was no longer seeing Clara except for stiff and restrained discussions of
family and business, Curtis kept up his correspondence with the guardian of J. P.
Morgan’s library, Belle da Costa Greene. She was his lifeline; should she turn against
Curtis, Morgan might well cut him off. From the Puget Sound winter cabin, he sent
her pictures and letters.

My Dear Miss Greene:

Just to let you know that I am alive and at work, and should be able to close up this
camp by the middle of May. This has proved to be a very satisfactory and comfortable
working camp. I am taking the liberty of sending you a small picture of the cabin,
so that you can see what wintertime looks like in this region.

He dropped pictures from many western locales into Miss Greene’s mailbox, a form of
showmanship that other artists in Morgan’s circle could not rival. There he was on
a white horse among the Spokane, with a tip of his hat, and there on a mesa in Arizona,
and this one shows him fording a river in the Rockies, and just look at the privation
of these writing cabins. In every picture he was a man of action in the middle of
the scene. But these shots masked a person who had lost his infinite sources of energy.
Heavy cigarette smoking in confined, damp spaces and lack of sleep exacted a toll.
By the end of that winter in Waterman, Curtis was exhausted. He took to bed for ten
days, trying to edit while lying on his back—the most painful convalescence he’d suffered
in two decades. Back then, he had Clara to care for him, and she adored him. This
time, he had the faithful Myers at hand, but his talents were limited to sprightly
shorthand and lucid prose of the type that took final shape in the volume on Joseph’s
tribe.

“The Nez Perce, a mentally superior people, were friendly from their first contact
with white men, and as a tribe they always desired to be so,” he wrote, drafting Volume
VIII. “Their history since 1855, and particularly in the war of 1877, tells how they
were repaid for their loyalty to the white brother.” It was an opinion. But also a
fact. The Nez Perce had been betrayed—
kicked in the ass,
as Curtis put it to Meany once—perhaps more so, without cause or reason, than any
tribe. They had not raped and scalped and raided and plundered. They had done nothing
but cooperate with whites, without pandering to them. Curtis had pulled his punches
with Custer, and kept his views to himself about the brutal mistreatment of the Navajo
at the hands of that well-regarded American hero Kit Carson. Even in his description
of the Cheyenne, aside from the account of the Sand Creek massacre, he’d shown restraint.
But—
damn all!
—he would not hold back on the Nez Perce. If a reader could look into the face of
Chief Joseph, could hear the story of the long retreat, the broken promises, the imprisonment
in Oklahoma, the decimation of a superior band of human beings, and not feel some
anger, then Curtis would have trouble living with himself. His
North American Indian
was a record, after all, and the record on this band of people was horrid. Look what
they’d started with: fine, timber-framed houses, a horse-breeding culture that Lewis
and Clark said was better than that developed on Virginia plantations, music and language
behind stories that explained the mysteries of the world, and a diet and way of life
that promoted longevity. Look what they’d ended up with: early death, jail, treaties
ignored, the noble descendants of a line of intelligent, resourceful leaders staring
at winter snows in exile on the Columbia Plateau.

“Their unfortunate effort to retain what was rightly their own makes an unparalleled
story in the annals of the Indian resistance to the greed of whites.”