Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (41 page)

The snow started that day, falling till dusk. At dawn, the world was white, not the
best canvas for the Curtis camera. They worked through the week in freezing temperatures,
draining of folklore another loner who’d been shunned by missionaries—“a devil man,”
as he was called. After three weeks in Kotzebue, they sailed south, for a second session
at Cape Wales, before an attempt to get back to Nome. The natives warned them that
they were pushing their luck. Harry the Fish knew as much. He told Curtis to look
at the empty seas: they were the sole fools testing the elements. Must press on, Curtis
insisted.

September 20. “Reached Wales yesterday a little after 3:00 . . . Harry was so mad
he was frothing at the mouth. Barometer falling rapidly and storm threatens.”

In a race between men and storm, the storm won. When the
Jewel Guard
scooted around the cape and tried to make it to Nome, it was hit by a blast of hard
winter. In the teeth of the blizzard, they made anchorage just offshore. The storm
raged for a full day. The boat iced up, taking on such a hard coating that it looked
as if it were sealed in lacquer. If they did not move, the boat would freeze in place
for the next eight months. Out again in open waters, the party ran into a second full
day of heavy snow—and a third, and a fourth. They chipped away, Curtis and Eastwood
clearing snow, Harry the Fish fuming, as the
Jewel Guard
struggled to get through the weather. “The wind picked up sections of the sea and
threw it into our faces,” Curtis wrote. The hull began to leak, filling with saltwater
from below and slushy snowmelt from above. They were alone, a speck of floating humanity
in a cauldron of white. “One nice thing about such situations is that the suspense
is short lived,” Curtis wrote. “You either make it or you don’t.”

They made it, sputtering back to Nome on a ship listing with water, its deck encased
in ice. A message sent earlier from Kotzebue indicated they had been lost at sea.
It was the second time in his life that Curtis had been formally given up for dead.
He was overjoyed, not so much at surviving the float through a frozen maze, but at
the work produced. If he could get these many negatives, this fresh material, home,
he knew he could close out
The North American Indian
with a lasting triumph. He bid goodbye to Harry the Fish and sailed for Puget Sound.

Curtis arrived in Seattle on October 9, 1927. In past years, after a successful trip
to some enchanted destination in Indian country, Curtis would hold court with the
press. Then, he was the swashbuckler with stories for the newspaper boys, a best westerner.
His shine was Seattle’s shine, Curtis and the city one and the same. But by 1927,
Curtis was a name from another era. If
The North American Indian
was an active project, few people in Seattle knew as much. After his steamer tied
up in Elliott Bay, Curtis headed immediately for King Street station to catch a train
for Los Angeles. After purchasing his ticket and storing his gear in the train car,
he was approached by two uniformed sheriff’s deputies and several operatives of the
Burns Detective Agency. It had been only half an hour since he’d disembarked from
the steamer.

“Are you Edward S. Curtis?”

Indeed. What’s this about?

“We have a warrant for your arrest.” The men slapped handcuffs on Curtis and marched
him off to jail. He was thrown in a cell with other unfortunates. The legal trail
from jail led back to Clara Curtis. She had gotten wind of her ex-husband’s pending
arrival earlier in the week, after reading a news story on his near-death experience
in Alaska. On Friday, she went to court and swore out an affidavit saying Curtis had
not paid alimony since 1920. She was owed $4,400. She said Curtis had slipped into
Seattle in June, traveling “under an assumed name,” and was set to return using similar
deception. At the close of business that day, a judge had signed an order for the
sheriff to arrest Curtis “whenever and wherever found.”

A
FTER SPENDING TWO
days in jail, the figure who stood before King County Superior Court Judge J. T.
Ronald on Tuesday morning was a shambles—hair matted, clothes soiled, eyes clouded.
Following more than a decade out of public view in his hometown, Curtis had made “a
startling, if humiliating reappearance in Seattle,” one reporter wrote. Could this
wreck who limped toward the witness stand, this low-voiced, snowy-headed, reedy-armed
man, be the same Edward S. Curtis who once bestrode the city, friend of presidents
and tycoons, a giant in the world of photographic art, the anthropologic auteur, the
man once hailed by a paper in the other Washington as “a national institution”?

In court, Clara Curtis repeated the charges in her affidavit. She identified herself
as a businesswoman who ran the studio—what was left of it, still in her ex-husband’s
name—in Seattle. She was deep in debt, and had been sued for failure to pay numerous
bills. Most of her troubles, the financial ones, could be blamed on the disheveled
person brought from his windowless cell, she claimed. Curtis denied delinquency, and
said the bills were news to him. The judge granted bail of $2,000 and released Curtis.
He was ordered to appear the following day with Mrs. Curtis to sort their affairs.

On Wednesday, the city was exposed to a view of Edward Curtis only a handful of people
knew—that is, a man who’d been living on gossamer strands. He took the stand and barely
looked up. The judge started in with questions.

What are his assets?

“None.”

That couldn’t be true. Everyone knew he was the nation’s premier portrait photographer—had
been, at one time, and so much in demand that he was picked to shoot the Roosevelt
family wedding, for God’s sake. Then, of course, he came under the patronage of J. P.
Morgan, once ranked the richest man in America, if not the world. He had produced
a film of some sort, yes? And
The North American Indian
—why, a single subscription sold for $3,500. How could he be insolvent?

“I have no funds, your honor. I have no business. Only
The North American Indian
—and for that I get nothing.”

Nothing?

Curtis trembled, bit his lip. He looked as if he were going to cry. The judge continued:
What about this studio in Los Angeles, operating out of the Biltmore Hotel? A chimera,
largely, Curtis replied—run by his daughter, it was her business, from which he received
nothing. Well, how did he pay his rent, put food on the table? Same as above: his
daughter. She takes care of him. A second round of questions followed on
The North American Indian.
How much money had J. P. Morgan put into it? Curtis took his time to do the math.

“The Morgan estate will have paid about $2.5 million when it’s done.”

The judge took that revelation as news as well. Surely Curtis had something to show
for $2.5 million?

“No. It operates on a deficit.” And the project was not only deeply in debt, but years
behind. He explained the original deal with Morgan, how Curtis was supposed to pay
his way with rich donors. Even if he sold all five hundred subscriptions—he hadn’t
reached half that goal—he would not get anything in return. All went into fieldwork,
printing costs, translators, a skipper named Harry the Fish, a cook named Noggie,
a car named Nanny, a Snake Dance priest in Arizona and on and on. The judge summarized
the Curtis defense.

“Do I understand that you will receive no money for this work?”

Curtis nodded, his eyes misted. “I work for nothing.”

Flabbergasted, the judge shook his head. “Then why are you doing it?”

“Your honor, it was my job. The only thing . . . the only thing I could do that was
worth doing.”

With that, the Shadow Catcher’s eyes welled up. The crowd of reporters gasped, scribbling
in haste. They were sketching paragraphs for early editions, sent outside the courtroom
by runners. Extra! Extra! “Nationally known compiler of Indian lore breaks down on
witness stand!” The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
described Curtis, this “international character, friend of Theodore Roosevelt and
associate of the late J. Pierpont Morgan” as a “shabby, hunched and weary figure”
who was “garbed in his rough hiking clothing.” The
Seattle Star
sent out this dispatch: “Curtis, overcome by the forced revelation of his life’s
secret, wept.” The sobbing grew more pronounced. Curtis had made thousands of appearances
over the course of thirty years, onstage and in the press, from Carnegie Hall to the
White House. He was a man’s man, in the public eye. If he had ever cried in front
of anyone, it had gone unreported. Ed Meany knew of a single instance, when he had
written his friend after the divorce, trying to cheer him with memories of mountain
climbing and better days. Curtis wrote back: “Reading it caused me to break down and
cry as a child.”

The judge gave Curtis a few moments to regain his composure. The witness tried to
contain himself, to fully answer the question of why he could stay with such a thing
if it only put him deeper into a hole.

“I was duty bound to finish.”

Still, the judge was stunned. How could someone without means work for no money? What
craziness was that? And to do so with no possibility of ever being made whole? Why,
why, why?

“Your honor . . . I am one of those fanatical persons who wants to finish what he
starts.”

After a three-day hearing, the judge slammed the proceedings to a close. The evidence
was inconclusive. Neither side could produce the original alimony document, the basis
of late-payment claims by Mrs. Curtis. Without that filing, the judge could not hold
Curtis. Plus, he was moved by Curtis’s confession, stripping himself of the veneer
of dignity that came with money. “The court cannot imprison a man for not doing what
he cannot do,” the judge wrote. Curtis was free to go.

If ever there was a sliver of doubt that Curtis had worked for nothing in order to
complete the “only worthwhile thing” in his life, the House of Morgan removed that
doubt when it took from Curtis the remaining ownership of his masterwork. There had
been discussions over several years about Curtis relinquishing his copyright to
The North American Indian.
The number that had been revealed in court—Morgan’s $2.5 million, an amount equal
to about $50 million today—provided further explanation for why Curtis let the ownership
go and never publicly complained about it. A document completed in early 1928 recorded
the transfer from artist to institution, even though the books did not show it on
the title page. He ceded copyright to the pictures and text of
The North American Indian—
the complete work—to the Morgan Company. Included were the copper- and glass-plate
negatives. What Curtis got in return is not stated on the transfer document, but it
appears to be little more than an agreement to publish the end of the work.

He had two volumes to go. The book on the Indians of Oklahoma, the one Hodge had sent
back as unacceptable, underwent a complete rewrite by Curtis and Eastwood, with much
back and forth. Seemingly every detail was put through the editorial sifter. “You
say tribes, for example, which have not been influenced by Christianity,” Curtis wrote
in one exchange. “In my lifetime, I have seen no group of Indians not influenced by
Christianity.” Eastwood had improved enough that he could get through much of the
writing without whimpering every time he had his ears boxed by Hodge. The last volume,
on the Alaska natives, looked to be an easier production. Curtis felt he had brought
home “a tremendous mass of material” from the north, he wrote Hodge.