Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (43 page)

Is Edward S. Curtis still alive?

If so, could he answer some questions by correspondence?

What had become of
The North American Indian
?

Married for more than twenty years, Beth was selling prints of Curtis Indians, supplementing
her husband’s work as a portrait photographer. Her father resided not far from the
studio, in a small apartment on Saturn Street. The address, just a few blocks from
Beverly Hills, belied his living conditions: Curtis hated the place. It was confining,
in a neighborhood crawling with poseurs and choked by bad air. Whenever he stepped
outside, he gasped at the yellow smog; some days it was so bad he could not see the
few miles to Hollywood Hills. At eighty, his hands were bent and gnarled by arthritis,
he could barely walk, and he was going blind. Despite all of that, he felt fairly
spry, a late-life vigor that he attributed to herbal tea from a plant in Oregon that
he’d been drinking for years. And, in an effort to hold on to his eyesight, he ate
a pound of carrots every day.

“Mr. Curtis is elderly,” Beth wrote Leitch in late August, “but very much alive. I
know he would be delighted to give you any information you might like concerning his
life.”

For a librarian, accustomed to dealing with voices from a muted assemblage of filed
books, this news was a jolt of discovery, on par with leafing through
The North American Indian
for the first time. She wrote Curtis immediately, and thereafter kept up a string
of inquiries. In her first letter, she explained how the eight volumes had come into
the hands of the historical society, and she seemed somewhat embarrassed to admit
that few people knew of their significance. Though, of course,
she
was not one of them. “It seems to me that your important and valuable work should
be brought to the attention of the present residents of Seattle.”

In reply, Curtis wrote in jittery, jagged cursive, for which he apologized, “I can’t
afford a typist.” He said he’d been in and out of the hospital for the past year and
was now bivouacked in the Saturn Street apartment, which felt like a cell. A nurse
made regular visits to assist him.

“In other words,” wrote the Shadow Catcher, “I am a shut in.”

He would be happy to tell about his life, but first, a request: “Should you contact
any of my old friends, please tell them I’m still alive and expect to be hanging around
for at least five years more.” There was plenty of swagger yet in the old boy.

He had started planning a new life in 1932, after leaving the hospital in Denver.
“Yes I am certainly broke,” he told Meany then, a condition that matched the financial
state of the country. “Other than that, I am not down and out.” Harold, his only son,
had moved west, and was interested in mining. So was Curtis. His long stay in the
Rockies had fired a passion for gold. He thought there might be a book on the subject
for him, and along the way, maybe a strike or two of the precious metal. In studying
the various methods for extracting gold dust, Curtis found them wanting. This void
produced an invention: the Curtis Counter Current Concentrator, which he had patented.
It was a device that looked like a short conveyor belt on an angled ironing board,
used to separate flour-fine particles of gold from the detritus of abandoned placer
mines. With his confidence restored and his clumsy invention in hand, the sixty-something
Curtis charged into the mountains of California and Colorado, as fevered for gold
as the Klondike prospectors he had disparaged in his youth.

In October of that year, Clara Curtis climbed into a rowboat near her sister’s home
in Bremerton, on Puget Sound. In the chop of a sudden breeze, she fell overboard,
into the 42-degree waters, and drowned. That was the official story. Clara was fifty-eight
years old. Her obituary in the
Seattle Times
was three paragraphs.

RITES ARRANGED FOR MRS. CURTIS, SOCIAL LEADER

There was no mention of her famous ex-husband, no mention of the years she’d toiled
without notice at one of the world’s best-known picture shops. Her membership in several
local organizations was recounted, highlighted by her presidency of the Women’s Commercial
Club. And one more thing: “She operated a photographic studio here several years ago.”

With the death of Clara, the last Curtis child left in Seattle, twenty-three-year-old
Katherine—called Billy—moved to southern California to be closer to the family. “The
three oldest children had basically disowned their mother,” said Jim Graybill, the
son of Florence. Katherine, not unlike her older sister Beth, had been a victim of
her mother’s rage and instability as the marriage fell apart and she scrimped to pay
the bills. Growing up, she never knew her absentee father. Through all those years
on the road, Curtis had written her. Some of the letters were fanciful, others full
of Indian stories from one reservation or another. But Katherine never saw those personal
notes until much later, when they were discovered in an old suitcase. Her mother had
hidden them from her. With Katherine’s move, Curtis now had two daughters and his
son nearby, and a fourth child in Oregon.

Curtis kicked around many a goldfield, scraping high mountain ground in the Sierra
Nevada until dark, the Curtis Concentrator grinding away. He wrote loving, imaginative
letters to his grandson Jim, often assuming the point of view of a cat, signing those
letters with an inky paw print. And he wrote ruminative, serious ones to Meany. After
crawling out of the basement of his depression, Curtis dashed off a forward-looking
update to Meany, gossipy and full of plans. He mentioned that his editor Hodge had
moved to Los Angeles, having taken up professional residence among the Indian artifacts
at the Southwest Museum, with its great hillside perch. And after much sleuthing,
he had found Myers at last, living in an apartment in the Bay Area, working as a company
secretary at a soft-drink factory. Curtis was writing again, he reported, though nothing
an academic would appreciate. “I am tired of being formal,” he told Meany. Most books,
he observed as an aside, are not worth the paper they are printed on. So many writers,
so many books, and yet what was the value of being published? The joy was in creation,
in the act of doing, in discovery. Rejection is not such a bad thing.

Writing to Meany with his newfound breeziness, Curtis hinted that he might have taken
several lovers over the course of his life, though he was discreet and named no names—simply
a justification. “We all know that from the earliest days of man to today, man’s natural
inclination was and is to indulge in sexual wandering.” This was telling, and perhaps
confessional. A lifetime of correspondence ended on that note, in August 1934.

Barely six months later, while preparing for his morning class at the University of
Washington, Meany fell to the ground and gasped for breath, in the grip of a titanic
stroke. The professor died in his office, age seventy-two. Meany was one of the last
of the early Pacific Northwest Renaissance men. He’d arrived in Seattle when it was
a sodden village of tree stumps and prostitutes, mud running down the streets, oyster
pirates sneaking in and out of Elliott Bay. In his time, he had been a newspaper carrier
and a newspaper publisher. He’d written scholarly books and short, punchy popular
essays. He was one of the first to see the value in native people living camouflaged
lives in the midst of a fast-changing region—Indians with a living link to a faraway
world, and a culture that the new residents couldn’t begin to fathom. Along with his
lectures on forestry, Indians and history, with his political work that established
a new campus for the University of Washington and a world’s fair for a young city,
he had climbed most of the mountains in the American far corner. A campus hall, a
Seattle hotel, a ski lodge and a mountain crest joined to Rainier were all named for
him. It was little known until much later that he’d been the soul mate and best friend
of Edward Curtis for almost forty years. From the audacity of the original Indian
idea, to the college football game with the aging Chief Joseph, to days when Curtis
dined at the table of a president, to the midnight blackness of late-middle-aged despair,
Ed Meany kept the Shadow Catcher going, always certain of his genius.

In the trough of the Depression, Curtis was living hand to mouth. The economy showed
no signs of improving—indeed, it had grown worse, after fiscal belt-tightening in
Washington shrank government payrolls that had given a lift to so many towns. And
so when Cecil B. DeMille called in 1936 with an offer, Curtis sold his gold concentrator
and once again took up the camera. The great director was shooting a big-budget western
featuring the most glamorous stars of the day, Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. It was
an Indian story, in its way, taking place in the Badlands, with cameo appearances
by historical characters like George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody. DeMille
planned to shoot it on location in Montana and the Dakotas, and could use Curtis’s
help with photographic stills, camera work and logistics. Had Curtis finished up with
that Indian business of his?

Indeed, he was free of his life work in every respect. The Morgan Library had received
an inquiry about Curtis in 1932, from a collector in Sweden. “I see that the extremely
valuable and significant work of ‘The North American Indian’ by Edward S. Curtis has
come to its close with the 20th volume,” the collector wrote. But there was no offer
forthcoming—just curiosity. “I fear its high price will never make it possible for
any library in Sweden to purchase it.” In fact, the House of Morgan was looking to
dump its Curtis collection. Throughout the Depression, they ceased any attempt to
sell or market the work, which remained in archival hiding. And so, when an offer
from a Boston rare-book dealer named Charles E. Lauriat Jr. came along, the library
liquidated most of its Curtis holdings. Morgan gave Lauriat the right to sell nineteen
complete sets of
The North American Indian,
in addition to thousands of prints, gravures, the priceless glass-plate negatives
and the copyright—all for a mere $1,000.

It was a huge haul of material from the book that had been compared to the King James
Bible. Each set contained more than 2,200 original pictures, almost 4,000 pages of
text, including transcriptions of hundreds of songs and dozens of languages, plus
additional portfolios of oversized photogravures printed on plates. Lauriat also acquired
the original copper photogravure plates used to make the images of the book. The library
records showed that over the years, only 222 complete sets were bound and given to
paid subscribers, mostly institutions, and another 50 were printed but never completely
packaged. The Morgan Library held on to copy number 1. A notice in its archives recorded
the divorce between patron and benefactor: “On May 15, 1935, the directors of
The North American Indian,
acting as trustees, assigned all assets to Charles E. Lauriat Company for the purpose
of sale.” Lauriat thereafter sold the 19 sets, and eventually assembled 50 or so others
into bound volumes, and he made fresh prints as well. A few of the glass-plate negatives
kept by the Morgan Library were overlooked in the sale and handover, and later disposed
of as junk.

On the movie set of
The Plainsman,
in eastern Montana, Curtis was home again in the land where he had deciphered the
Custer story, where he and the Crow translator Alexander Upshaw had talked well past
midnight about the ways of the Apsaroke. DeMille was filming a story of craven Indians
and heroic white men, just a few miles east of the Little Bighorn battlefield and
within a hawk’s glide of the home of the Sioux. If Cecil B. DeMille had ever asked
him, Curtis could tell the story of a people who rode bareback at full sprint, more
graceful and powerful than any of the hired hands on this set. He knew the original
names of many a mesa, mountain and watering hole. He could pronounce the words, and
tell how
The People
came from a hole in the ground long ago, animated by
The
Creator.
But he was not in the Badlands to convey Indian realism or Indian mythology. He was
there in service to Paramount Pictures and a fiction built around Gary Cooper as Wild
Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. The lead Indian roles were played by
Paul Harvey (not the radio announcer) and Victor Marconi, with Anthony Quinn in a
bit part as a surly native. Curtis’s job was in the background, taking stills of the
stars in action, the Italians in Indian paint, the hero Custer who rides in with the
cavalry to save the day. A number of Sioux were recruited for a few shots; they were
ordered to whoop, holler, grunt and fall down dead.

The movie was a rare crumb of good fortune for Curtis in his old age. He returned
to southern California, back to occasional pokes in the Sierra for gold and to steady
research for a new book on the oldest metal lure of all. But over time, the body would
no longer do the work. He could not will muscles in his bad leg to move, nor could
he clamber over rocks without risking a fall. His children told him to give it up.
The occasional letter found him, with a query not unlike that of the librarian: are
you still alive? A curious Mrs. Gardner from Seattle wrote in 1937, wondering what
had become of
The North American Indian.
“The negatives and copyrights as a whole passed completely from my hands,” Curtis
informed her matter-of-factly, adding that he could not use his own work without getting
into legal trouble. “I devoted thirty-three years to gathering text material and pictures
for the twenty volumes. I did this as a contribution; without salary, direct or indirect
financial returns. When I was through with the last volume, I did not possess enough
money to buy a ham sandwich; yet the books will remain the outstanding story of the
Indian.” At the end of the letter he mentioned that the work was valued overseas—why,
in a museum in Great Britain, patrons are not even allowed to touch the pages! “A
gloved assistant does it for them,” he noted.