Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (3 page)

It was awful not being able to get around, watching his mother put together a meal
of boiled potatoes and bacon grease. Out the window, though, was a world that gave
flight to his spirit. He became a close observer: how the color of the land would
change subtly in shifting light, the moments in midmorning when the fog lifted, or
breaks in the afternoon between rain showers, when he could see the spectrum of the
rainbow in a single drop held by a rhododendron leaf.

A sixteen-year-old girl, Clara Phillips, started visiting the bedridden man in the
homestead cabin. She had a mane of thick dark hair, worn well past her shoulders,
and exhibited a feisty independence. Clara’s family had moved around: from Canada
to rural Pennsylvania, where she was born, and then to Puget Sound. The Phillips girls,
Clara and her sister Nellie, were different from the other homesteader children; they
used fancy words from books and were curious about things beyond the little community
that would become Port Orchard. When she met Curtis, Clara had not yet finished with
her schooling, and she fascinated him with all the things she knew that he did not.
When Curtis talked of what he wanted to do when he regained his mobility, she alone
seemed to believe him. There would be no more berry-picking or clam-digging, no more
wood-cutting or fence-fixing, no more brickyard. He would no longer put his back into
his living.

Clara visited one day and found Edward sitting up, enraptured by a contraption on
the kitchen table: a 14-by-17-inch view camera, capable of holding a slice of life
on a large-format glass-plate negative with such clarity it made people gasp. The
camera was not cheap, the price much derided by Edward’s mother. He had bought it
from a traveler looking to raise a stake on the way to goldfields. Ellen Curtis thought
it was a waste: what was he going to do with that costly and fragile thing? Even
Wilson’s Photographics,
which Curtis had used to help build the camera back in Minnesota, had warned that
photography was “a circus kind of business, and unfit for a gentleman to engage in.”

The healing invalid’s plan was bold: he would borrow $150 against the property and
use the cash for a move to Seattle. He had heard about a picture studio in town, and
it needed a new partner. The big, bustling place across the water was a short boat
ride from home, but a world away from the sodden ground of the homestead. “They call
it the Queen City and talk about its great future although it wasn’t very long ago
there were Indian attacks on the town,” the preacher Johnson Curtis had written his
family after he and his son put their first stakes in the ground. “It’s over 10,000
people and there’s a university in the middle of town and hills all around it. Edward
says they have telephones, 120 of them!” With the 14-by-17 view camera, Curtis vowed
to leave the subsistence life forever.

Newly mobile in 1891, Curtis went off to Seattle to make a go of it. What he knew
about studio photography was laughable. And who would support the family? But in a
new town, in a new land, he could fail almost without consequence. What he brought
to the city, his sister Eva recalled, was unbridled curiosity—“always nosing into
something interesting.” In Seattle the $150 stake was enough to buy Edward a name
on a storefront, “Rothi and Curtis, Photographers,” and an apprenticeship to a dominating
partner. Clara joined Curtis in the city, scandalizing her family. She lived in a
boarding house—the same one as Curtis. Her mind was set, as was his. They married
in 1892. She was eighteen, he was twenty-four.

Success came quickly. Curtis left Rothi and joined Thomas Guptill in a much bigger
enterprise, a studio on Second Avenue with photoengraving facilities. The Curtis couple
lived above the shop until a baby, Harold, born in 1893, prompted a move up the hill.
By 1895, just four years after his prolonged convalescence, Curtis was a Seattle celebrity,
his name known around the Pacific Northwest. He had money to stuff the house on Eighth
Avenue with fine furniture. More importantly, it was big enough to bring the rest
of the family over. His mother, his sister Eva, his brother Asahel, Clara’s sister
Nellie and two of her relatives—they all moved in.

Curtis himself was seldom home. He not only mastered the artistry of working with
a box to capture light and shadow and the way a personality could change with a gaze
one way or a tilt of the head the other, but was equally skilled at technical details.
“Finest photographic work in the city” was the claim of the studio in the Seattle
directory of 1895. The next year, a Seattle paper backed that boast, predicting that
“in a very few years these young men will have the largest engraving plant west of
Chicago.” Curtis grew the beard that became his trademark, wore stylish clothes, learned
fast how to charm the leading citizens of the city. Photoengraving was laborious;
each picture was finished by hand, with a honeyed sepia tone. More than a decade earlier,
George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, had developed a much easier way to process
a photograph: dry gel on paper, replacing heavy plates wiped with chemicals. “You
press the button, we do the rest” was the marketing slogan, put to use when the Kodak
Brownie was sold starting in 1901. But Curtis wanted nothing of the shortcuts. He
preferred the quality and detailing he could get with glass-plate negatives, no matter
how heavy, dangerous and expensive. There was more than enough work at the studio
that Curtis could hire his brother Asahel, six years younger, as an apprentice in
1895.

That Edward Curtis, at the age of twenty-seven, had made the journey from ragged
forager with a dented spine to the talk of a robust town full of similar self-confident
swells of the Gay Nineties would be enough for some men. But Curtis was hungry for
the bigger dare. The house, the business, the family, the gadgets, the praise from
the press and the nods of approval from moneyed gentlemen—it was a start. Curtis also
did those nudes: bohemian, exotic women showing their nipples just above the lace,
angelic faces looking bored in a gilded parlor. Curtis had left the grim-faced Christian
sensibility of his father behind, like so many in the West.

His adopted city spread north, south and east, limited only by the inky depths of
Puget Sound to the west. The 10,000 people Reverend Curtis had spoken of had become,
in barely a decade’s time, a city of nearly 100,000, and that amount would double,
and then some, in the next ten years. The climate was said to be “salubrious,” a wonderful
euphemism for a place that got thirty-six inches of rain a year, most of it falling
between November and March. The new inhabitants, having pushed away the Indians for
a pittance, and with only a few minor skirmishes, could not believe their good fortune.
Here were seven hills, the highest rising to just over five hundred feet, with the
cornucopia of Puget Sound lapping at one shore and the long, clear magnificence of
Lake Washington on the other, a mountain lake at sea level. You could see ten feet
down in the fresh, clear waters, all that glacial-rock-filtered runoff clean enough
to drink.

Between the two big bodies of water were other lakes, streams and waterfalls, even
a clearing of level ground where the tribes used to gather to give away things and
eat until they fell over, stuffed and happy. A garden setting it was, just as the
British explorer had said, requiring virtually nothing from man to improve on it.
Near Pioneer Square was a low-lying island where the natives from the reservation
used to park their dugout canoes, there to sell shellfish to the three-masted schooners
anchored nearby; the island lost its natural moat when it was filled with debris.
Cable cars moved smartly up and down First Avenue, and buildings with Romanesque and
Palladian features sprouted overnight, rivaling in height the five-century-old trees
that had been in their paths.

Curtis himself was put to work on behalf of the city’s hagiography. He shot dreamy
landscapes at the edge of the city, which filled a full page of a respected Seattle
broadsheet, hailing “A New Garden of Eden.” A story in that annual progress edition
told of a visiting Oxford don who asked about Seattle’s history. He was taken to see
one of the pioneers who had been around when the city was started.

“Started!” the visitor said. “Do you realize how peculiar it is to an Englishman to
hear of men who were present when a city was started?” Life in the new Northwest,
the story concluded, was “wholly beyond the comprehension of the Europeans.”

There remained in the tree-shaven, steam-shoveled, hydraulic-sluiced urban makeover
the stubborn figure of Chief Seattle’s last surviving child. Curtis approached Angeline
now with a proposition. He tried a simple negotiation, laying out his idea. Angeline
backed away, her hands deep in the pockets where she kept her rocks. Curtis used Chinook
jargon, a few hundred words that had been a primitive trading language dating to the
Hudson’s Bay Company days. Angeline shook her head.

“Nika halo cumtuv.”

Curtis opened his leather case and displayed a few portraits—beautiful, full-faced,
radiant subjects. And such detail, like real life. He gestured to her and then to
the pictures.

“Nika halo cumtuv.”

At last he reached into his pocket and produced some coins. More hand gestures followed.
A simple exchange did the trick: money for picture. Up the hill they walked, Angeline
pausing to rest every few steps, to the studio at 614 Second Avenue. Inside, it took
some time for Curtis to persuade Angeline to get comfortable. Plenty of people had
taken her picture before. It was usually quick, followed by a growl from the native
woman. Curtis had her sit and look around the room, daydream if she liked, gave her
some tobacco for her pipe, maybe one of his cigarettes. Of course! After some time
she loosened the bandanna and the scarf.

“No, no! Just as you are.”

And the cane: he wanted the Indian’s stick of worn hardwood to be in the portrait
too. It was as much a part of Angeline as the faded calico skirts. She did not smile,
not even an attempt, and he did not want her to smile. He was looking for the lethal
glare she saved for the boys who threw rocks at her. He hoped to convey a face that
had seen worlds change, forests leveled, tidelands filled, people crushed. As a girl,
she never dug a clam or washed a bit of clothing. Her father had slaves from other
tribes do the menial work. Her current status, the scrubwoman in the shack, was anything
but quaint. Already, official histories had established a consistent narrative of
natives welcoming the passage of one era to the next. “The advent of the white man
was a pleasant episode in the lives of these savage people,” one of the first chroniclers
of Seattle said. “Their arms opened to receive them as superior beings, and the lands
they possessed were freely offered for their acceptance.” The face of Edward Curtis’s
last Indian of Seattle would say something else.

What Curtis knew of Indians was informed, in large part, by depictions of dead natives
he had seen in a book as a child. More than a thousand Eastern Sioux had been rounded
up following an 1862 raid on settlers in Minnesota. The carnage was widespread in
villages and farms in the southwest part of the state; by one estimate, eight hundred
whites were killed in what became known as the Sioux Uprising. The Sioux had been
roused to violence by repeated violations of their treaty, and by the mendacity of
corrupt government agents who refused to make the required payments from that pact.
In defeat, after the uprising, the Indians were sentenced to death. At the same time,
many in Congress demanded that all Indians be wiped from the map, echoing the view
of their constituents after the Sioux had caused so many casualties. President Lincoln
commuted the sentences of most of the insurgents. But the death penalty remained for
more than three dozen of them. On December 26, 1862, they were all hanged, the largest
mass execution in American history. Curtis had studied an engraving of the lifeless
Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota. Necks snapped, faces cold—it haunted him. “All through
life I have carried a vivid picture of that great scaffold with thirty-nine Indians
hanging at the end of a rope,” he wrote.

But the Curtis of 1896 was no crusader. Not for him was the growing movement of missionaries
and government policymakers to bring Indians into society, to get them into tight-fitting
shoes, suit jackets with watch fobs, with proper haircuts, to Christianize them and
force them to tend a farm, just like any yeoman American. Indians and their treaty
rights, political autonomy and property disputes—all of that was somebody else’s fight.
Politics. Injustice. Blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Curtis wanted pictures. The exchange
between photographer and subject was purely a business proposition.

He gave Angeline a dollar for her time, equal to a week’s worth of drudge work. What
emerged from the many takes and the alchemy of developing chemicals was a face that
could knock a door down with its slit-eyed stare. A tuft of silver hair peeks out
from under Angeline’s scarf. The lines of her face are so deep, so prominent, they
look like scars from a knife fight, as if someone had carved her visage from a pumpkin.
Her mouth is downturned. Curtis allowed light to fall on her cheekbones and nose,
enough to contrast with the sad, dark eyes, looking away at another time. Beneath
her chin, where the scarf is tied in a knot, is another bit of hair. The shawl is
wrapped completely around her shoulders, held together by a safety pin. That simple
pin stands out as a diamond brooch might on a society matron. In the bottom corner
of the photo is the knob end of Angeline’s cane. To look at the face and not see humanity
is to lack humanity.

The portrait of the princess was magnificent, and Curtis knew it, for everyone who
saw it was impressed. But the picture was not what he’d had in mind when he first
spied Angeline against Puget Sound. Over the following weeks Curtis returned to Shantytown.
He saw Angeline in the mudflat, stooped and dark-cloaked, shovel in hand—the clam
digger in her element. This was more like what he had seen in a flash that day on
the shore. The sitting portrait was fine, but he was drawn to something more natural.
Angeline had to fit her background, and that could never be the studio on Second Avenue.
Nor was he interested in the image of the shrew, the hag, the crone. He gave her money
to continue her grubbing and prying, as she had for decades. From these everyday scenes
came the inspiration for two pictures. One he called
The Clam Digger,
the other was
The Mussel Gatherer.
No frowning, vanquished Indians here. No starving, bedraggled aborigines. No warriors.
They were neither threats nor objects of pity. The subsistence life was front and
center, an ageless figure digging for food in front of a tranquil bay, with a distant
island and benign clouds in the background, no sign of a city at all. No face was
visible either—just the hunched-over silhouette. Through his camera, Curtis gave the
backbreaking work, which he never considered anything but lowly, a noble patina.