Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (35 page)

I
N THE GOOD YEARS
, when she was Clara the bright, she alone shared his idea to accomplish something
great and lasting, and she alone assured him he could do it. His passion was for her
before it was for images on platinum. He wrote hundreds of letters to her in those
days of struggle, sharing his doubts, living the Big Idea in words. Clara had saved
the letters, her children explained later, because they made her feel close to him
at times when she didn’t know where he was or what tribe he was with, and because
it reminded her of what she loved, and because—yes,
he was a genius, damnit.
Look at how he agonized. Consider the torture, on body and mind. And here and there,
some sweet touches. But Clara Curtis eventually destroyed the letters, as family lore
has it, leaving behind very little from the days when they were one. What lives beyond
her years, the lasting words, come from a pad of court documents in Seattle, divorce
case number 118324 in King County, the first filing on October 6, 1916. Here she makes
the legal claims that stab at a marriage when it is down and already dead. Here she
goes public with a view of a man no one would like.

“He has been guilty of inhuman treatment,” refusing to communicate with her in any
way, she alleges. He was an absentee mate: “The defendant has been at home but little
for ten years.” He gradually reduced her role in the business, pushed her out even
as he brought the children in. He was “incompetent” to put their “minor daughter in
charge of the studio” while leaving Clara in the dark. Everything they own in common—the
studio, the Seattle house, the land across the sound—is not just mortgaged, but facing
possible foreclosure. Through twenty-four years of marriage “this plaintiff has been
a faithful wife to the defendant,” while he “associated with other women.” This last
claim was news, of the screaming variety.

WIFE SUES ED S. CURTIS FOR DIVORCE
CHARGES FAMOUS MATE LIKED OTHER WOMEN’S COMPANY

The
Seattle Star
put the above two-stack headline on page one, a full eight columns across the top
of the fold. It was bigger news than bootleggers paying off detectives, Mother Jones
stirring up New York or speculators cornering tickets to the World Series. No names
of other lovers were listed. She may simply have been trying to meet the legal threshold
for divorce, charging Curtis with adultery and cruelty. In any event, “Morgan’s friend,”
as Curtis was called by the papers, was a lout. “He made every effort to turn the
children against me by false stories,” Mrs. Curtis was quoted as saying. The loaded
terms of broken love never make for nuanced reading in the papers. And because Curtis
could not be reached for comment when Clara asked for a divorce, his side of the story
went unreported.

He did respond later, in a court filing listing his assets. Clara had asked for the
studio, the house and alimony payments for the one child still at home. Harold, the
oldest at twenty-three, was living in New York. Beth, twenty, and Florence, seventeen,
were in Seattle, though both had moved into a boarding house, and taken their father’s
side. “They were devastated,” recalled James Graybill, the surviving grandson of Edward
and Clara Curtis. “It was a real bad deal for the girls because of all the publicity,”
Graybill said. “My mother [Florence] was a freshman at the University of Washington,
and she ended up dropping out of school because of the divorce.” Only little Katherine,
seven, remained with Clara.

Whatever Seattle society thought of the best-known resident of the city, they could
not have imagined he was anything like the pauper who told his story in the grim detailing
of his financial plight submitted to the court. For
The North American Indian
“he receives no salary” and is working without financial incentive, for he has “no
contract to get returns.” He is essentially living off the kindness of others: Morgans
in New York, the Rainier Club in Seattle, loans from friends like Meany and Pinchot.
The film, so well reviewed, so revolutionary, made no money, and in fact put him deeper
into debt. Finally, he denies that he has ever been unfaithful.

Curtis was lucky to get anything fresh for
The North American Indian
in 1916. Volume X, on the Kwakiutl, published the previous year, was as impressive
in narrative, illustration and breadth of information as anything he had yet done.
With the new offering, Volume XI, Curtis returned to his home region for a third and
final time, devoting most of it to the Haida and the Nootka, people who lived on the
western side of Vancouver Island. It was almost spare, this volume, not nearly as
rich in variety as prior offerings. It didn’t feel quite so luxurious, and for this
Curtis blamed the war. When the powers of Europe started slaughtering one another,
Curtis was unable to get the handmade Dutch paper he had used in all the other books.
Worse, the war froze the economy, and all subscription sales came to a halt.

Curtis made no mention of his personal troubles in writing to Jack Morgan, nor did
he allude to them in Volume XI. Regardless of the turmoil, Curtis presented a handful
of remarkable pictures, most of them taken in 1915. One subject was the Makah, who
lived in the village of Neah Bay, Washington, a sodden place that can get nearly two
hundred inches of rain a year and is as far west as a person can go on the American
mainland without falling into the ocean. He found the people there a match for the
weather, and wrote that “their later reputation for exceptional surliness” was deserved.
They lived in unpainted plank houses, which he showed in unglamorous poses, looking
slapdash and weather-worn.
Village Scene—Neah Bay
was the title of that one, with a mongrel dog foregrounding a row of low-slung, windowless
shacks built around a muddy street. It was an exceptional composition for Curtis,
who often went out of his way to avoid an impression of squalor, even as he tilled
the theme of last days. By contrast, the houses of the snug harbor across the strait
on Vancouver Island, in an image titled
Village of Nootka,
are the picture of settled native prosperity. And he certainly was more fond of the
Indians on the island than those hugging the savage coast of Washington. In his history
of the area, he wrote how five flags—of Spain, Russia, Great Britain, the United States
and Canada—had flown over some of the coastal villages of Vancouver Island, each power
prompting little more than a collective shrug from the longtime inhabitants. An odd
culture was now taking shape, though Curtis hinted at its transient nature.

“The parade ground cleared of the heavy forest by Spanish soldiers is now used by
Indian boys in the American game of baseball.”

For all of his less-than-complimentary photos of the coastal natives in repose on
the American side of the saltwater border, Curtis put his best shine on those same
people when they took to the sea. His pictures of deep-water fishing, salmon-spearing
and archers firing at sea otters from rocking canoes—these action sequences also capture
an anthropologic moment. He found picnic-table-sized fillets of halibut, laid out
on the beach for drying in the unreliable Neah Bay sun. Here was a woman cooking whale
blubber over a driftwood fire, surf on the horizon. And a partially butchered humpback
on the shore, eyed by two tiny women in silhouette, conveys the enormity of the creature
and of the task at hand. His best work is called
The Whaler—Makah,
a full-length portrait of a barefoot, grim-faced, rat-haired man wearing what looks
like a bearskin cloak. The picture was staged for Curtis, based on oral history. The
man is holding a heavy wooden harpoon shaft, five inches in diameter, maybe twenty
feet long, attached by rope to a pair of floatable sea lion bladders.

In his introduction, Curtis credits “the increasingly valuable assistance and collaboration”
of Myers, his cowriter and chief ethnologist, and tips his hat to Edmund Schwinke
for gathering the notes on Makah customs. Actually, Myers was now writing most of
the text. When Hodge wanted editorial changes, the requests went straight to Myers.
Meanwhile, Curtis had patched together another short-term plan for money. He contracted
with
Leslie’s Illustrated,
a popular weekly, to do a series of short films on the national parks, which would
be shown in theaters, and pictures for the magazine. He wrote Schwinke, urging him
to be ready to “leave on the shortest possible notice” to assist him with the filming.
He was to meet him at the Grand Canyon, and venture from there to Yosemite, Yellowstone
and other scenic wonders of the West, dividing up their work. It would be the usual
Curtis dash, a pace that never slowed: “lose no time in getting everything in such
shape that you can pull out for a trip of a month or six weeks.”

But Schwinke had other ideas. The young, buoyant Curtis aide had not been paid for
two years, since late 1914, though he didn’t seem particularly upset by that. After
six years of service to Curtis, working as a stenographer on the Columbia River, a
cameraman on the Kwakiutl film and a field journalist among the coastal tribes, Schwinke
was mulling over a career change. He was twenty-eight, unmarried, without savings.
It was time to do something about his own life. One of his proposals was to have Curtis
sell the studio in Seattle—the whole operation—to Schwinke and Ella McBride. It would
remain the Curtis studio in name, offering Curtis Indians, but all obligations and
profits would go to the pair of assistants. Curtis turned him down. No, never. The
studio was his base. Without it, he had nothing. Schwinke replied with a rebuff of
his own: he was through with
The North American Indian,
through with Curtis—
and please don’t take it personally.
He informed Myers of his plans to quit before he told Curtis. “I notice you don’t
think much of photography as a vocation,” Schwinke wrote Myers. “You may rest assured
that mine will not be motion photography. I have had enough of that to last me at
least three lifetimes.” When Curtis got word, he tried to persuade Schwinke to stay
on, sending a check for his
North American Indian
work, explaining that he was trying to recover money lost on the movie. “As to the
Film Co: we have sued World Film for $148,000 and anything else the court might see
fit to give us but like all legal matters it will be rather long and drawn out. So
far we have never had one cent on the picture and I am now endeavoring to carry through
other activities.”

Schwinke insisted his decision was irreversible. Though the fieldwork thrilled him,
beginning with those heart-stopping rides down the rapids of the Columbia River, he
was tired of all the deadlines, telegrams and stress, tired of seven-day weeks, no
love life, no social life, no fun. He took the summer off to hike in the mountains,
sail around the islands of Puget Sound and the San Juans to the north, canoe and laze
by campfires—a tonic, all of it. When he returned, he took up business with McBride,
who quit the Curtis studio just as the divorce was making news. But the wartime economy
was a crusher for business start-ups. Schwinke then moved to Ohio, married, and joined
the army after the United States entered the war in 1918.

Now, Myers and Hodge were all Curtis had left on the payroll, though it was a stretch
to call it that. Myers was dispatched to California to start research on the hundreds
of small tribes of the state, essentially working for free, the lone pulse of
The North American Indian.
After editing Volume XI, Hodge had nothing more in the Curtis pipeline. He took a
prestigious job in New York, moving to the Museum of the American Indian. He agreed
to put his red pen through Curtis’s work, vetting it as before, should anything new
be forthcoming. Their correspondence fell away. Updates were rare, and vague. “Myers
is here with me,” Curtis wrote at Christmastime, 1916, from Bouse, Arizona, a mining
camp in the Sonoran Desert, just the place for two lonely men. A year later, he informed
Hodge that he was trying to gin up some work on the Cherokee, who’d been forcibly
transplanted from the Georgia pines to the Oklahoma prairie in the nineteenth century,
and now lived on an ever-shrinking reservation. He then went dark with his editor.
After more than a year, Hodge did hear from Myers with news of Curtis’s whereabouts.
From New Mexico, the field assistant told the editor that the Shadow Catcher was “riding
on work trains and carrying his luggage across arroyos.”

Curtis also fell out of contact with Belle Greene. She had admonished him, just after
Morgan’s death, for appealing to her in such a personal way. Secure for the long term
in the Morgan book palace, she became strictly businesslike with Curtis, while telling
others of her fabulous love life. She continued her affair with the Renaissance art
expert, yet found time to entertain marriage offers from wealthy suitors. “I sent
word that all such proposals would be considered alphabetically after my 50th birthday,”
Greene wrote a friend.

Curtis seemed to have disappeared. Queries to the New York office were met with cryptic
replies that he was “out west” and could not be reached. That was true for many months,
and may have been therapeutic as much as it was an attempt to dodge Clara’s lawyers
in Seattle. He managed to get back on Mount Rainier, a beloved aerie, for the pictures
he owed
Leslie’s,
and cobbled together that work with another contract, with the U.S. Forest Service.
His nights were spent on the rim of the Grand Canyon, alone, or in the welcoming embrace
of the Sierra’s light in Yosemite, waterfalls lulling him to sleep, or next to geysers
in Yellowstone, a tired mule for company, or in a dusty train station in the Southwest,
waiting for the local to carry him to the next destination. Meany received an occasional
note postmarked from a national park, the divorce not mentioned, Curtis’s enthusiasm
focused on Indians or the love they both shared for the big volcano south of Seattle.
Meany’s group, the Mountaineers, was leading a number of first ascents up Rainier,
and Curtis daydreamed of spending climbing days with his old friend. Several times,
Curtis slipped into Seattle, sleeping at his usual bunk at the men’s club, checking
in with daughter Beth at work.