Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (31 page)

Curtis had been questioned while on tour about his picture opera’s title and the
theme that ran through every volume of his work: vanishing race. To the surprise of
some authorities, the census of 1910 counted 276,000 Indians in the United States—a
gain of 39,000 over 1900. Yet Indians made up less than a single percent of the nation’s
92 million people. But vanishing? How could that be if the overall numbers were going
in a positive direction? Several scholars, quoted in Curtis profiles in the newspapers,
started to take issue with him. “We have as many Indians now as ever existed in the
United States,” said one authority in the
New York Times.

Curtis called that “an absolutely ridiculous statement.” He said the census had been
too broad, counting those with just a strand of Indian heritage. Curtis estimated
only about 100,000 “purebloods” were left from shore to shore. He explained what he
had witnessed over the past ten years. Along the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark
had seen thousands of people in numerous communities, Curtis found only two small
villages with a combined population of less than 200. Around the greater Puget Sound
area, where the government had estimated 75,000 natives at treaty time, “today there
are scarcely 2,000,” said Curtis. The Crow had gone from a population of 9,000 in
the nineteenth century to 1,787 in the twentieth. The Atsina numbered barely 500,
down by 75 percent. The Piegan, who once counted 12,000 members, now had barely a
tenth of that. All the evidence—again, as he saw among the Hopi—was of diminishment
and loss. Curtis cited Geronimo’s own words, from his ghostwritten autobiography of
1906, in which he said, “We are vanishing from the earth.” Geronimo himself had recently
left the planet, after he got drunk one night and fell off a horse-drawn wagon.

Beyond that, raw population figures were not the crux of the issue. Religion, lifestyle,
language—fast disappearing. “Whether the American aborigines are a vanishing race
or not, the vital question is one of culture rather than of numbers,” he said in defense
of his work. In his public appearances Curtis was often asked: in a generation’s time,
would anything be left of the real Indian? And on occasion would come a rejoinder,
though not from him: it’s not up to a white photographer to define authenticity.

In the fall of 1912, he was back on the road with the picture opera, the same routine
as earlier, till the end of the year. The tour was a runaway success, judging by the
reviews and the crowds, but it did not make Curtis financially whole. In business
matters he was a consistent failure, and his hard-luck streak continued with this
production. Like a lot of artists, Curtis had a reverse Midas touch: the creative
dream, stoked by audacity, always trumped pragmatic concerns. A more earthbound man
would have made a radical change in plans when troubling signs appeared at the first
stagings of the musical. Ticket sales were strong, but after paying for everything
Curtis came up short—$300 to $500 per show, even after sellouts. Road expenses were
much higher than he had anticipated. “Cheer up,” he wrote Hodge, a bit of springy
sarcasm creeping into his voice, “the worst is yet to come.”

Indeed, a few months later he was staring at bankruptcy. “My losses during the winter
have been very heavy,” he confided to one friend, halfway into the tour. He took out
loans from J. P. Morgan, though he tried to keep it secret, for these were not the
kind of patron-and-artist deals of earlier days that had been sent to the newspapers
for favorable headlines; this was survival money, at 6 percent interest. Two promissory
notes in the Morgan archive, one for $12,500, another for $5,000, show Curtis going
deeper into his benefactor’s keep. No matter: he would never give up, he explained
to the House of Morgan. His written list of subscribers included the following names:

H
IS
M
AJESTY
, G
EORGE
, K
ING OF
E
NGLAND
H
IS
M
AJESTY
, A
LBERT
, K
ING OF THE
B
ELGIANS
A
NDREW
C
ARNEGIE
M
RS
. E. H. H
ARRIMAN
J
AMES
J. H
ILL
A
LEXANDER
G
RAHAM
B
ELL
MRS. F
REDERICK
V
ANDERBILT
H. E. H
UNTINGTON
S. R. G
UGGENHEIM
C
OL
. A
LDEN
B
LETHEN
G
IFFORD
P
INCHOT
T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT

He was hustling the Vatican, the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
Harrison Gray Otis, and more than three dozen institutions, ranging from the National
Library of Wales to the Spokane Public Library. More than ever, he was two people:
the public Curtis, celebrated onstage, fussed over by some of the most famous names
in the Western world, and the private Curtis, a lonely man without a permanent home,
who couldn’t display two nickels that he hadn’t borrowed from someone else. Curtis
had obtained a $3,000 loan from Pinchot, who was ginning up Teddy Roosevelt’s independent
run for the presidency on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. The prickly forester was
quite the nag on the repayment schedule, and the money may have been more bother than
it was worth. In a long explanation for Morgan’s staff on how he had come up so short,
Curtis blamed his youth and naïveté at the time when the titan first agreed to fund
him. The terms of the contract, in which Curtis worked for free and had to rely on
advance payments of $3,000 per subscription just to bring the books out, were fatally
flawed. Expenses far exceeded income. His team never rested, having traveled enough
“to encircle the globe twenty times.” He accepted the blame, and faulted himself for
letting early flattery overwhelm common sense. “Frankly, being young then, I did not
properly discount the enthusiastic commendation and gush,” he wrote. To Belle Greene
he was more candid, confiding his deepest fear: that the great project was not just
stalled, but was over—dead well before its finish.

“It is with considerable hesitation that I speak in this way,” he wrote Greene, “but
it is only fair that you have knowledge of the situation.” With her, he said, he felt
“a sympathetic interest” in the work. He explained how he had given his life to creating
a lasting record of the continent’s first people, and in so doing, “I have made about
every sacrifice a human being can for the sake of the work, and the work is worth
it.” Long gone from the pages of that letter was any trace of the cocksure Shadow
Catcher who strode into Morgan’s den in 1906 and walked out a King of the World. Now
he spoke of posterity and the greater good, like his preacher father appealing for
funds to do the Lord’s work. His Indian volumes would belong to the ages, and for
that “the people of the American continent will look upon it as one of Mr. Morgan’s
greatest gifts to man.” The stunning news in this letter, buried deep, was that even
if he could get back on his feet financially, Curtis would need many more years than
he’d envisioned to complete all twenty volumes. Originally, of course, he told Morgan
he could finish in five years. Then, to the
New York Times,
he had stretched that deadline to thirteen years. Now he told Belle Greene, “field
research is a matter of twenty-three to twenty-five years.” Yes, a generation’s time,
and maybe then some, was needed. By that calculation, Curtis might not be done until
1931—an eternity.

At the same time, Curtis no longer held back in press interviews when asked about
government treatment of Indians. Once he’d crossed his own line with Volume VIII,
on the Nez Perce, he didn’t hesitate to express open contempt. Clipped of his confidence
and much of his sense of self-worth, Curtis was more empathetic toward the beaten
subjects he photographed. “We have wronged the Indian from the beginning,” he said
in a lengthy magazine profile. “The white man’s sins against him did not cease with
the explosion of the final cartridge in the wars which subjugated him in his own country.
Our sins of peace . . . have been far greater than our sins of war . . . In peace,
we changed the nature of our weapons, that was all; we stopped killing Indians in
more or less a fair fight, debauching them, instead, thus slaughtering them by methods
which gave them not the slightest chance of retaliation.”

When the show landed in Seattle in the fall of 1912, Curtis was greeted by a fawning
crowd at the city’s opera house. Onstage were fake rocks and real totem poles. In
the orchestra pit was a twenty-two-piece ensemble. Meany introduced his friend to
the audience, was lavish in praise and then beamed throughout the production. Curtis’s
daughters applauded wildly; their phantom father was home, and everyone loved him.
The city embraced its most famous citizen. He retired late at night to his bunk at
the Rainier Club, the huzzahs still ringing in his ears.

Curtis sized up his years: he was almost midway through a masterpiece, hailed as
such from coast to coast. Eight volumes had been published. If one of the streetcars
clanking up and down the hills of Seattle ran over Curtis, his place in history would
be assured. “Such a big dream,” as he originally told Bird Grinnell, could actually
be realized, though perhaps not in the span of a single man’s lifetime. Nonetheless,
an epic achievement. His personal life was a disaster—facing bankruptcy and a failed
marriage. His mother was ill, his estranged wife could not stand the sight of him,
and he was not on speaking terms with his brother Asahel. Curtis’s debts were in excess
of $50,000, and he had less than $150 in the bank. He had told Hodge that “if I had
an earthly thing that was not mortgaged, I should immediately start out to find some
one to loan me a few dollars on it.” The larger problem, should he ever crawl out
of this financial sinkhole, was that by the end of 1912, J. P. Morgan owned Curtis.

Now to the positive side. His children loved him, and he talked of bringing them into
the business. Beth, as a teenager, showed an adult’s understanding of what was required
to make a great picture in the studio, and she had infinite energy, just like her
father. The two standout talents on his staff, Bill Myers on the book project and
Adolph Muhr in the studio, were still with him, as was Ella McBride. Their work had
never been better. Money came mainly from selling Indian prints to tourists from the
Curtis studio. At the age of forty-four, though he had suffered two physical breakdowns,
Curtis still had the fire in his belly. At times he felt like the fearless and peripatetic
twenty-five-year-old who ran up and down Mount Rainier, a cigarette clenched between
his lips, heavy glass plates on his back.

And Curtis had two more things going for him at year’s end: a boat and a fresh plan.
The vessel was the
Elsie Allen,
forty feet long, more than ten feet at the beam, with both a gas engine and sails,
a sleek craft built by Skokomish Indians for salmon fishing. Curtis had purchased
the boat, cheap, at the end of the Columbia River expedition in 1910, not long after
he let his tiny craft go to a watery grave off the Pacific shore. The new boat had
proved tough and seaworthy plying the high surf off the Washington coast in that year,
where Curtis got to know the continent’s western whaling people, the Makah. And it
was just the right size for sailing in and out of the fjords of British Columbia.
Curtis was developing an obsession—not unlike his love of the Crow and Hopi—for the
coastal tribe up north known as Kwakiutl. The new plan had to do with sailing away
on the
Elsie Allen,
up the Strait of Georgia, to put together a feature-length film. Curtis had traveled
with a motion-picture camera since 1906. By 1912, thanks to advances in technology,
this fledgling entertainment form had taken off; every American town of any size now
had a picture theater. For Curtis, film was a logical next step. When he ducked into
a nickelodeon to watch a half-dozen short films, he found himself in a familiar setting—live
music and a projection onstage, just like his touring show. Some of the early silent
films even had painted negatives, giving a number of their scenes color, though the
process was costly and labor intensive. The problem with these silent cinematic bites
was length.
The Great Train Robbery,
produced in 1903, made use of pioneering techniques like cross-cutting and close-ups,
but it was only twelve minutes long. The popular films of the first years of the century
were mostly primitive westerns—a cowboy aiming his pistol at the camera, causing many
in the audience to shriek and duck—or chase films, a thief pursued by cops, or stagy
theatrical numbers. By the time Curtis was mulling over his film, multireel picture
shows were starting to hit theaters. Using several projectors, the way Curtis had
employed a pair of stereopticon portals to put his still images onscreen, filmmakers
could show a continuous story lasting almost an hour.

Curtis wanted to film a mythic tale of native people in the days before European contact.
He thought the Kwakiutl, with their ornamented war canoes, their striking totem poles
and house posts, their large-timbered communal lodges, their hunting prowess off the
dangerous Pacific shore, and a history that gave some credence to those who said they
once dabbled in headhunting and ritual cannibalism, would be the perfect subject to
fill a movie screen. There would be action, drama, love, war, mystery and history,
all of it from a world about which Americans knew little. No tribe on the continent
had developed more elaborate, artistically detailed masks and costumes of salmon,
wolves, turtles, frogs, bears, eagles and ravens. “Their ceremonies are developed
to a point which fully justifies the word dramatic,” Curtis wrote.