Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (33 page)

Without money for fresh field ventures, Curtis rummaged through his past work. He
put together everything from his home region and packaged it in New York for the next
offering of the book. He would publish the picture of Princess Angeline, taken seventeen
years earlier, and a few more from those days, including
The Clam Digger, The Mussel Gatherer
and
Shores of Puget Sound.
For this portfolio he added pictures from a 1912 summer sortie to the Olympic Peninsula,
the far Washington coast and Vancouver Island. He could have found Indians on the
streets of Seattle in that year; some had begun to appear on corners downtown, selling
baskets. His brother Asahel took one such picture, a huddled group of Makah: they
look like beggars stranded in the urban wild. This seemed a direct slap at the brother
who was lost to him, the brother who wanted nothing to do with sad-eyed Salish squatting
on sidewalks, hands out.

He kept his focus on people in the half-dozen or more tribes still close to nature
in the coastal Northwest. Whereas his previous volume was a picture story of a ferocious
river and the people who defied its twists to pull fish from the water, this book
would present a more orderly gathering of food from the sea. Their salmon camps, their
spreading of nets, the call of a tidal shift twice a day were sedate by comparison
with the rock-balancing acts on the Columbia River. He would show bare-breasted women
in cedar-root skirts, and many silhouettes against muddied skies. As before, Curtis
had an eye for monumental carpentry, revealing the massive, rough-hewn timbers hoisted
atop posts in the house and lodge frames of the Cowichan.

In Seattle, Myers shared Curtis’s enthusiasm for the tribes in their backyard. As
they mailed drafts back and forth across the country, the cowriters shaped a narrative
of people who had very little in common with the Indians of the interior West. This
book included songs about a potlatch, a canoe and love. There was an alphabet, as
always, and observations on appearance and accessories: “To heighten their beauty
as well as to protect the skin from wind and sun, both sexes rubbed on the face a
cosmetic compound of grease (preferably kidney fat of the mountain goat).” And Curtis
continued to lash out at the historical record of mistreatment. In explaining the
Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854, he wrote that numerous tribes had given up most of
the Puget Sound region in exchange for a couple of parcels totaling four thousand
acres—“ludicrously inadequate in area, these lands were for the greater part totally
unsuited to the needs of the Indians.”

J. P. Morgan died as the book was going to press. Just days after the funeral, Curtis
added a tribute:

IN MEMORY OF MR. J. PIERPONT MORGAN
In the final hour of producing this volume we are saddened and borne down with the
loss of the patron who made the work in its full scope possible . . . In this as in
all matters with which he was associated he saw the scope; in a measure the magnitude.
The fact that he was so able to comprehend this meant the rendering of a service to
the world of art and literature of much value. It meant a substantial and comprehensive
addition to the documentary knowledge possessed by the human race.

In closing, Curtis vowed to finish the work, essentially daring Morgan’s heir without
naming him, and without alluding to his own troubles.

The effort from now until the final volume is written will be for work so strong that
there will be an ever-increasing regret that he could not have remained with us until
that day when the last chapter is finished.

Curtis was summoned to the House of Morgan barely a week after he wrote that tribute.
J. Pierpont “Jack” Morgan Jr. had shown a bit of the collector’s knack of his namesake
father, though he was less ostentatious about it. He was a bibliophile too, once boasting
of the deal he got on a draft of Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
while on a trip to London. The Morgans had been proud enough of the work Curtis had
done to date that they gave out volumes as gifts to King Edward VII, the Guildhall
Library in London, the Göttingen Library in Germany and numerous museums and book
palaces in the United States. But all bets were off after the elder Morgan’s death,
and Curtis feared the worst. Young Morgan gave him a firm handshake and asked him
to be seated.

“I can well understand your anxiety as to what’s to be done about
The North American Indian,
” he said, and then got right to the business end of things. He’d been going over
the books, and yes, as Belle Greene had indicated, there were questions about how
the money was spent and why Curtis was so deep in the hole and behind on the original
promise of the schedule. Morgan’s advisers had conducted a lengthy debate about whether
to support the project to the end or to cut their losses and call it quits now.

“As a family,” Morgan told Curtis, “we have discussed the matter thoroughly and have
decided to finish the undertaking father had in mind.” Relief. But there would be
some changes. Morgan money would continue to fund field research—on a limited basis,
and only after Curtis submitted detailed proposals, dollar amounts to be decided down
the road. Curtis would continue to work without salary or grant. Curtis explained
that he had launched his film company, that investors were in hand and that the anticipated
profits from
In the Land of the Head-Hunters
would likely be enough to cover publication of all future volumes. Very well, but
there was the ongoing problem of budgeting his time. Curtis was spending far too many
days soliciting subscriptions, with little to show for it. From here on out, the Morgan
bank would handle more of the business, to try to limit the hours Curtis had to spend
with potential donors. Curtis’s job now was to get back in the field, finish his next
volume and do his film.

Although this news did not guarantee financial stability, it at least meant Curtis
could pack up his tripod and head out to Indian country once more. He was already
thinking beyond the Kwakiutl, to California and its numerous small tribes, to new
ventures among the natives of New Mexico, and finally a return to the Hopi. By committing
the funds to see the fieldwork through, Jack Morgan had apparently freed Curtis of
the humiliating experience of asking rich people to contribute to his life work—for
now. Miss Greene would be staying on in her present job as gatekeeper and principal
collector of the Morgan Library, per the patriarch’s will, with a bump in salary.
She was indispensable.

“Things have cheered up,” Curtis wrote in a quick note to Greene before catching a
train headed west.

Out of the sunless canyons of New York and into a theater of green, Curtis joined
his crew in British Columbia. George Hunt had found a number of activities to photograph
and was well on his way to assembling a cast and building sets for the movie. They
would begin shooting in 1914, a year out. Curtis felt renewed. With a fresh bounce
in his step, he walked the shore of Vancouver Island, all pulsing tides and overgrowth,
more than fifty pounds on his back, and slogged through the rainforest in search of
people unaffected by modern life. In one of the wettest parts of the world, the Indians
spoke of two broad categories for rain: male and female. “A ‘she rain’ is gentle,
caressing, clinging, persistent,” Curtis explained in an extended note to his daughter
Florence, one of the many letters to his children that picked up as he entered middle
age. “A ‘he rain’ is quite the opposite in all ways but that of persistence.”

The natives had long ago figured out how to twine cedar strands into hats, capes and
skirts—water-resistant clothing spun from the forest. From the time of George Vancouver’s
landing more than century earlier, visitors had been intrigued by people who seemed
perfectly comfortable wearing tree bark. By now, though, most of the natives had ditched
traditional outerwear for coats from the Hudson’s Bay Company store. When Curtis was
paying for a portrait, he asked for the original garment if a family still had one.

In the fall, Curtis was called back to Seattle to confront another loss, sudden and
horrid: Adolph Muhr was found dead. His contribution to The Cause could not be overstated.
If a face was particularly radiant, sad, lost, lovely or revealing in a fresh way,
it was due in considerable measure to Muhr’s hand in the studio. He had a mortician’s
touch for refinishing. The nights of struggle that produced an otherworldly Canyon
de Chelly came from the collaboration between the two men. A self-portrait of Curtis
the young dandy was actually taken by Muhr in the studio. And he was the link between
old-school Indian pictures—done for another one of his employers, Frank A. Rinehart—and
those that hang in art galleries. Muhr worked for Curtis from 1904 to 1913, and passed
on many of his studio tricks to Imogen Cunningham and Ella McBride. His death was
unexpected—a heart attack, apparently—and the reported circumstances were odd. Muhr
had been called as a witness of a minor matter in a murder trial. He gave his testimony
in the morning, describing the yard of a neighbor who’d been killed. In the afternoon,
with court adjourned for the day, Muhr was strolling down the James Street hill with
a prosecutor when he commented on the suddenness of his neighbor’s death. “You never
can tell just how near you are to eternity,” he said. Half an hour later, Muhr was
dead. He was fifty-five.

Curtis was beside himself. In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his patron
and his photo-finishing partner. Muhr’s end came “without an instant’s warning,” Curtis
told Hodge. In a brief tribute in Volume X, Curtis wrote: “Death has again entered
the ranks of those who have labored on this publication. This time, the call came
to Mr. A. F. Muhr, who for so many years gave his excellent service in the photographic
laboratory.” The last word was an apt description of all the creative experimentation
conducted by Muhr and Curtis in the Seattle space. In Muhr’s place, Curtis promoted
McBride, a Curtis acolyte in many endeavors since 1898. She would run the studio.
He also brought in as an assistant his daughter Beth, who was seventeen and wanted
to learn her father’s business. Curtis stayed in Seattle until year’s end, bunking
at the Rainier Club, guiding the transition and preparing to shoot his feature-length
film.

By the spring of 1914, Curtis had spent parts of four seasons studying and photographing
the people who would star in his movie. He was impressed by Kwakiutl women. “They
retain a fairly pleasing form well past middle age,” he noted. “Women who were grandmothers
have unsagging breasts which would be the envy of sub-debs.” The men, not so much:
gloomy, like the surroundings—“they seem completely lost in dark broodings.” But as
he spent more time with them, Curtis picked up on their sense of humor. He particularly
liked how they messed with the minds of missionaries. One day, George Hunt burst into
Curtis’s tent with news of a great cultural discovery made by a man of the cloth.

“What is it?” Curtis asked.

Hunt fell to the floor in laughter.

“Tell me!”

The Kwakiutl had explained to the missionary the meaning of the totem pole figures—a
breakthrough for the cleric, or so he thought. “The man at the bottom, the one with
the mustache, is the first Spanish explorer,” said Hunt. “Above him, that naked figure,
is Adam. The woman is Eve. And the bird at the top represents the Holy Ghost!”

Curtis loved the inherent drama in the tasks of a Kwakiutl day. A sea lion hunt was
fraught with tension, a life-and-death pursuit of one-ton mammals in roiling seas.
A funeral in that part of the world could make an Irish wake look sedate, and often
lasted three days, with a potlatch as the high point. And those naval warriors in
decorated canoes were just the right scene-chewing fodder for a motion-picture camera.
Though Curtis wanted to show the Kwakiutl in the time before George Vancouver had
sailed up the Strait of Georgia in 1792, he also intended to tell a tight, gripping
story. It was mythic and indigenous, one he and Myers had recorded during earlier
encounters with the Kwakiutl, but also universal: a journey of a young man in search
of love and retribution. The movie would follow Motana, a chief’s son, on a sojourn
that could have been taken from the ancient Greeks. Motana loves Naida and intends
to marry her. He upsets the spirits one night by thinking of his love during fasting.
Now he must act or perish. To placate the gods, he has to kill a whale, and a sea
lion, alone. His odyssey draws him into battle with a rival clan of evil headhunters,
setting up a daring attack—the climax—and a victory, feasting and celebration, with
a big wedding. For good measure, Curtis added a near-tragic twist at the end.

Because the Kwakiutl of 1914 dressed not unlike the average Canadian whites living
in a small coastal town, Curtis and his crew outfitted the Indians in sea otter skirts
and cedar bark capes, made at Hunt’s direction by the natives. The movie payroll also
produced fresh-carved totems, a fifty-foot war canoe and a range of masks and accessories.
Clip-on nose rings and wigs were distributed. A leading man was cast—Motana was played
by Hunt’s son, Stanley. Three different Kwakiutl women starred as the love interest,
after family members objected mid-filming and pulled one, then another, of the actresses.
With Curtis directing, his young aide Schwinke running the camera and Hunt barking
out orders translated from English into the native dialect, the shooting began in
earnest in late May. Though it was a fictional story, Curtis described his film as
a nonfiction saga, an attempt to document (or re-create) what Pacific maritime Indian
life was like before white contact. They shot for three months, working every day
in the long light of the north.

“Our activities are such that they should be classified as labor rather than work,
but all goes fairly well,” Curtis wrote Hodge on the night of the summer solstice.