Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (32 page)

He would seek to re-create a story of maritime magical realism. Yet it would not
be fiction, as he imagined it, but rather “a documentary picture of the Kwakiutl tribes.”
This was a novel idea. The newsreel era was still some years away. What passed for
reality cinema—called actuality films—were travelogues or boring clips of ships arriving
in port or trains pulling out of a station. Curtis would use an all-Indian cast, all
Kwakiutl, not a single Italian in face paint on a Hollywood back lot. He would shoot
on location. He would make sure that every prop used, every costume worn, was authentic.
The artwork, the houses, the totems, the dugout canoes, the masks, the weapons—all
would be made by Kwakiutl hands. He would record native music and get musicians to
play it. In essence, the film was a grand expansion of his still pictures and written
narratives. Most people who heard his outline thought it was brilliant. Curtis had
no doubt he could pull it off, though it would involve a new round of begging from
fresh donors. But this film business, he insisted, would be a moneymaking proposition,
unlike the picture books. Film was the future. Going over the numbers, he thought
he would have little trouble making enough on this movie, and several others, to win
freedom from debt and get his great work back on track. He organized the Continental
Film Company and sent out a prospectus to investors. “The profits to be had from such
pictures are quite large,” he wrote, “and exceptionally substantial dividends can
be depended upon.” With success, he estimated, the company could make a profit of
$100,000 on his first film. And so, with this venture into the new world of motion-picture
storytelling, Edward Curtis doubled down: the way to save
The North American Indian
was to create the world’s first feature-length documentary film.

In British Columbia, Curtis hired a man who lived in both the native and the white
realms to be his guide to the Kwakiutl. George Hunt was a chap-faced, sunken-cheeked,
foul-tempered son of a Tlingit woman and a Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company drunk. As
a boy, he learned to read by copying labels at the trading post. His father beat him
for his efforts at literacy, which sent young Hunt to a hideaway in the woods to continue
his self-education. When he signed on with Curtis, Hunt was just short of his sixtieth
birthday, with a droopy, frost-colored mustache, a freckled bald head and ever-present
suspenders holding up his trousers. At first he helped primarily with Volume X. Unlike
the previous books, this one would be devoted to a single tribe. Hunt found subjects
and settings, and smoothed over disagreements. He was Curtis’s ticket to participate
in sea lion hunts and forbidden ceremonies. “Inherently curious and acquisitive, and
possessed of an excellent memory,” Curtis said of Hunt. “Our best authority of the
Kwakiutl Indians is this man who, without a single day’s schooling, minutely records
Indian customs in the native language and translates it word by word into intelligible
English.” For the film, he designed sets, contracted actors at 50 cents a day and
worked on story lines. Hunt was well qualified for his tasks: he’d married into the
Kwakiutl, spoke the language of course, but also understood the needs of outside researchers.
For nearly two decades, he had worked for Franz Boas, the German-born Jew considered
the father of American anthropology. Their most significant season was a winter with
the Kwakiutl—brooding and dark, with ceaseless rain outside, but full of theater and
bright storytelling inside—that informed two expansive works Boas published on these
people. In addition, Hunt helped to bring a Kwakiutl village to Chicago’s world’s
fair in 1892, which gave him a taste of the staging and stereotypes that played best
for a big urban audience. In Hunt, Curtis saw traits of Upshaw, his beloved Crow interpreter.
He liked Hunt’s feistiness, his ambidextrous qualities on land and sea, his rough
edges; in Hunt’s hardscrabble background there also was something of Curtis.

Building on what Boas and Hunt had assembled—and the original information collected
on an earlier field trip of Myers’s—Curtis had plenty of written material for his
account of Kwakiutl life. The problem was that what most interested him for his film
had been outlawed by the Canadian government. Religious ceremonies, masked theater,
exchanges of food and goods for the betterment of clan relationships—all were forbidden
in Canada by decree in 1884. It was as if British authorities, during the long rule
over the Irish in their homeland, had outlawed the Roman Catholic mass or dances built
around Celtic songs. At one time, Hunt had been jailed for his role in resuscitating
native rituals; he was released only after convincing the government that his actions
were anthropological study—science.

At night, over a smoky fire of hissing wet wood, Curtis and Hunt would exchange rants
against the government in distant Ottawa. They were particularly upset that it had
outlawed the potlatch. Curtis had participated in this great giveaway, practiced by
Northwest tribes from the Columbia River to Alaska, after the reburial of Chief Joseph.
He knew it well, and he tried to set the record straight in
The North American Indian,
even correcting the much-respected Boas. The potlatch, said Curtis, was a source
of great pride for the giver, rather than an act of greed for the recipient, as some
missionaries had portrayed it. The government thought it would bankrupt families.
But after participating in the Nez Perce giveaway following Joseph’s death, Curtis
believed the potlatch was a way to ensure that riches were always passed around, that
tribal wealth never stayed in one clan. In this belief he echoed the sentiments of
Maquinna, the powerful Nootka chief, who compared the potlatch to a white man’s bank,
saying, “When we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs
and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good.”

At the risk of imprisonment, Hunt went to work organizing a potlatch and other banned
ceremonies for the film. Curtis also ordered him to collect skulls, angering some
elders, in order to re-create what the ancient Kwakiutl did with the heads of rivals.
This gave Curtis his movie’s title, with more than a nod at the popular market:
In the Land of the Head-Hunters.
To make film history, he would have to break the law.

With the picture opera tour at an end, and Hunt’s advance work under way in the north,
Curtis returned to settle his personal affairs in Seattle. He rested, sleep coming
much easier in the long night of the Northwest’s early winter. He renewed his work
at the studio, catching up with some of the latest techniques in luminescent black-and-white
printing being developed by Muhr, his wizard of the darkroom. Raising money for the
new medium of film, he found, was not going to be nearly as difficult as selling subscriptions
for the books. And then word came on December 11, 1912, of a personal loss: his mother,
Ellen Sherriff Curtis, died at the home of her other Seattle son, Asahel. It was not
unexpected; she was sixty-eight and had been ill. Young Ed Curtis had been the breadwinner
for his mother in Wisconsin starting at the age of fourteen, and later at the Puget
Sound homestead. After his studio became a success, he had moved her into his own
crowded home in Seattle. But over the past decade, the famous son was never around,
and she grew closer to Asahel. At the funeral, in the chapel at Butterworth & Sons
in downtown Seattle, and at the burial at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the two brothers
did not speak to each other.

Curtis moved to New York for the winter of 1913 to manage what had become a much more
complicated enterprise under a board of directors. While fund-raising for the film,
he’d stopped soliciting subscriptions for
The North American Indian,
much to the dismay of his overseers. They were in the midst of deciding how to resolve
his debts when, on the last day of March, a Marconi wireless carried news of global
impact from overseas: J. P. Morgan had died in Rome, at the age of seventy-five. After
traveling to Egypt with his daughter and son-in-law, Morgan had suffered a series
of small strokes, and then a much larger one. In Rome he took an eight-room suite
at the Grand Hotel and tried to recover. Morgan turned the heat up in his quarters
and refused to eat, though he sucked on a lit cigar. As word had leaked about his
condition, the financial markets turned shaky. There was little the doctors could
do but sedate him with morphine. On the day of his death, his temperature shot up
to 104.5 degrees, and he faded in and out of consciousness. The titan’s body was taken
by train to Paris, and then by ship to New York. Select mourners were allowed to view
his casket at the Morgan Library. On the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange
was closed until noon in his honor, and a parade of prominent capitalists walked past
five thousand roses at the service in St. George’s Church.

“My heart and life are broken,” said Belle da Costa Greene.

She would be even more devastated after Morgan’s will was read. His estate, valued
at about $80 million, was not nearly as great as had been speculated. Morgan had put
most of his money into art, much of it housed in his library at Thirty-sixth and Madison.
His collections were worth perhaps three times as much as the liquid assets in the
will. After leaving multimillion-dollar trusts for his daughters, millions more for
friends, charities and causes, he designated $3 million outright and the bulk of his
fortune in stocks, bonds and property to his son, Jack. That included the library.
Belle Greene was given $50,000 (just under $1 million today). The will stipulated
that she be kept on in her current position.

To Curtis, the death meant more than the loss of a patron who had given wings to his
work, the only rich man who stuck with him. Morgan as Medici also gave him freedom:
he never told Curtis what to write or how to print a portrait. He never urged him
to hold back on Custer, or bite his tongue when he lashed out at the government. His
name was on the checks and on the title page of every volume to date, with a gracious
credit.

Within days of the old man’s funeral, Jack Morgan signaled a change in direction.
Art purchases that had been in the works were frozen, along with other commitments.
When Curtis asked Belle Greene to lobby on his behalf, she informed him that Jack
Morgan’s auditors were going over the books and were concerned about expenses run
up by
The North American Indian.

Curtis wrote a long missive to Greene in his defense. The problem was not too much
money spent, he said, but too little. J. P. Morgan’s backing had been an excuse for
other rich people to decline. He was extremely grateful, mind you, but “the attitude
of letting Mr. Morgan do it has been difficult to overcome.” Back in 1906, total costs
were projected at $1.5 million. Morgan had contributed an initial $75,000, leaving
Curtis to raise more than $1.4 million from subscriptions. If he secured 100 subscriptions
a year, in five years he would reach the goal. But he was averaging only 23 a year.
More than the money, the work had at times strained him to the breaking point.
The North American Indian
was not “a pamphlet at six bits,” he raged, but “a real piece of investigation” and
“a real book.” The House of Morgan was lucky to have a man of his fortitude. “Few
men have been so fortunate as to possess the physical strength I have put in this;
and year in and year out I have given to the very maximum of my physical and mental
endurance in my effort to make the work a worthy one.”

He closed with a wish to see Belle in person, perhaps socially. She let him know
that it was not possible just now to meet face-to-face. As for the future, everything
was under review—including the library itself. They would have to wait, both of them,
to see what Jack Morgan had in mind for their fate.

T
HOUGH HIS EARS
were bruised by the street sounds of New York City, and his quarters at the Belmont
Hotel could not have been more confining, Curtis let his mind drift to the opposite
edge of the country, to the seagoing people of the Northwest Coast. Writing Volume
IX and sketching his film outline on the Kwakiutl, he wanted to present the wizards
of the Pacific shore as some of the most artistically talented people in the world.
For everything the Hopi could do weaving yucca strands into basketry, for every geometric
pattern the people of Acoma could paint on clay wedding cups, for every dazzling design
a Sioux or a Crow could stitch to a buffalo hide stretched around pine poles—it paled
in comparison to the communities of the coastal rainforest. Cubist art by the young
Pablo Picasso and others was then popular in Paris, works that forced one to see a
woman’s nose or an apple in a still life from multiple views. But these Indians had
been doing that for centuries: haunted stares locked in cedar, faces of sharp, surreal
angles, part human, part wolf, part eagle. A single totem, rising thirty feet, was
a log with a life, an elaborate story embedded in the grain.