Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (44 page)

Curtis had reached that stage in life when the social rituals are not weddings or
baptisms, but funerals and burials. His younger brother Asahel died in 1941, of a
heart attack, at the age of sixty-six. Over the course of his career, he probably
took more pictures than did Edward. He shot everything: the first skyscraper in Seattle,
the Smith Tower, which for much of the twentieth century was the tallest building
in the West; the earth-moving projects that left spires of the original city around
as engineers tried to make a flat metropolis; Indians on downtown streets and athletes
on the field; dams, schools, office buildings, ships, trains and roads. His camera
had a utilitarian eye, without any weakness for sentimentality. He was best known
for his outdoor work, as a climber and a conservationist. With Meany—a friend to both
Curtis brothers—he guided the Mountaineers through decades of growth, and was the
first person to scale many of the iconic peaks in the Northwest, including Mount Shuksan
in the North Cascades. He carried his feud with Edward to the end: the brothers had
not spoken to each other in over forty years. His ashes were placed at the site of
the newly named Asahel Curtis Memorial Grove in Snoqualmie National Forest, east of
Seattle. When a son, Asahel Curtis Jr., was asked in 1981 about the brothers’ estrangement,
he said only that it was “ridiculous.” And when the same question was put to Jim Graybill
in 2012, the sole surviving grandchild of Edward hinted at a shameful story, saying,
“I just can’t discuss it.”

Curtis moved to a farm near Whittier, California, owned by Beth and her husband.
There, he talked to the chickens, grew avocados and oranges. He was bored and restless,
in need of an adventure. He spent hours preparing large meals at family gatherings,
where he took issue with anyone who did not see the greatness in his cuisine. Shortly
before Harriet Leitch contacted him, Curtis moved back to the Los Angeles.

Near the end of 1948, Curtis started sending memories to the Seattle librarian. While
rummaging through a trunk at his daughter’s home, he’d come upon a seventy-four-page
memoir he’d written decades before and never published. He spent all afternoon with
this account of his adventures—twenty thousand words. “I began reading it at once
and found it so interesting that I did not put it down till the final word was reached.”
He sent a copy to Leitch, and he also shipped her the major reviews of
The North American Indian,
from all over the world. These clippings, he wrote, should give her a sense of “the
considerable importance of the work.” He said he’d received more than two hundred
notices, all favorable but one—a critic who disagreed with Curtis’s revisionist account
of the Nez Perce War. (Later historians sided with Curtis.) And he urged Leitch to
spend some time with a single book from the series, to pick one at random: “Look at
but one volume to see what a task it was to collect such a vast number of words of
assorted dialects.” Along the West Coast alone, “we recorded more root languages than
exist on the rest of the globe. In several cases we collected the vocabulary from
the last living man knowing the words of a language. To me, that is a dramatic statement.”

Leitch was impressed. And she was “thrilled,” she said, to read the autobiographical
sketch. She knew his reputation as a photographer, but the anthropological work, the
salvage job of languages from the scrap heap of time—that was a revelation. Countless
words that had bounced around pockets of the Great Plains or dwelled in hamlets along
the Pacific shore lived—still—because Curtis had taken his “magic box,” the cylindrical
recorder, along with him when he went to Indian country. Also, he had preserved more
than ten thousand songs. And yet, for all the stories, myths, tribal narratives and
languages Curtis had saved for the ages, it was curious, the librarian suggested,
that the photographer had never told his own story. Why no memoir beyond the sketch
he’d sent her? Surely his dashing and perilous life, the unstoppable young man in
his Abercrombie and Fitch, the self-educated scholar who made significant breakthroughs
in ethnology and anthropology among overlooked nations, his proximity to J. P. Morgan
and Theodore Roosevelt and E. H. Harriman and Gifford Pinchot, his campfire tales
from Chief Joseph and Geronimo and the last of the mighty Sioux warriors—surely there
was a great, sweeping story to be told.

Curtis had indeed started to record his personal history, sitting for days with his
children so that they might have something for posterity. But now he lacked the oomph;
the project had been shelved. “Among the foremost why nots, I am not in physical or
financial condition to attempt so large an undertaking,” he wrote. Plus, he’d heard
a familiar refrain from the gatekeepers of American letters in New York: “A publisher
told me there is but a limited market for books dealing with Indian subjects.”

He spent Christmas with Beth—a “delightful” holiday. With the dawn of the new year
of 1949, Curtis started to regain some energy. The stories spilled out of him, in
letters mailed up the coast to Harriet Leitch. He recalled his father, the sickly
preacher and Civil War private, who died when Curtis was fourteen, leaving him to
become “the main support of our family.” He told about his accidental avocation, how
he took up photography only after a severe back injury prevented him from making a
living as a brickmaker or in the lumberyards. He described for Leitch his first Indian
picture, Angeline—“I paid the Princess a dollar for each picture I made. This seemed
to please her greatly.” He gloried in long accounts of Mount Rainier climbs. He talked
about his work habits. “It’s safe to say that in the last fifty years I have averaged
sixteen hours a day, seven days a week,” he wrote. “Following the Indian form of naming
men, I would be termed, The Man Who Never Took Time To Play.”

Their correspondence carried through another death, in April of 1949—William Myers,
the writing talent behind
The North American Indian.
He had married a second time and moved to Petaluma, north of San Francisco, where
he managed a small motel. He was seventy-five at life’s end, six years younger than
Curtis. A routine obituary in the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
did not bring up Edward Curtis or the fact that Myers had spent the majority of his
adult life doing first-rate field anthropology and writing about it for the most detailed
study ever done of native people of North America. He was described as a motel manager,
retired and childless.

Through the summer and into the fall, Curtis worked away at the book he was building,
tentatively titled
The Lure of Gold.
The walls of his tiny apartment were plastered with notes in his unreadable scratch.
“I’m busy with The Lure of Gold,” he wrote Leitch in October, brushing off a fresh
round of questions from her about his Indian work. By the spring of 1950, Curtis was
almost manic with energy, again crediting his Oregon tea. “My health is improving,
and now I look forward to celebrating my 99th birthday.” He parried back dozens of
answers: on the reburial of Chief Joseph, on the good work of Professor Meany, and
how together they discovered the true story of the Nez Perce, a pattern that followed
with the Custer revision. How did he do it? “I didn’t get my information from the
white man.”

Near the end of 1950, Curtis turned cranky. If it wasn’t “that damn television” blaring
in a neighbor’s apartment, it was his arthritis, which on many days prevented him
from holding a pen, let alone set it to paper. On such occasions, he said his “pen
died a sudden death.” A few days before Christmas in that year, Belle da Costa Greene
passed away in New York City, at the age of sixty-six. Her sway over the Morgan Library
had lasted forty-three years, until her retirement in 1948. She never married, and
took many of her secrets with her to the grave: she had burned her personal papers
shortly before her death.

Curtis limped into 1951, the late-stage burst of energy having dissipated. “I am
still housebound,” he wrote, “living the life of a hermit.” He wished for simple things—a
stroll to the store to buy his own food, a taste of fresh strawberries, an afternoon
on a park bench. “It’s Hell when you can’t go to the market and get what you want.”
The apartment was suffocating him. He started calling himself Old Man Curtis, and
his handwriting became illegible. In July of 1951, he was forced by finances to move
to an even smaller apartment, at 8550 Burton Way, in Beverly Hills. He called it “the
most discouraging place I have ever tried to live in.” Through that year, Curtis deteriorated
further, though he responded to Harriet Leitch’s prodding in brilliant flashes here
and there, with some of his sharpest recollections. He told stories of the Harriman
expedition to Alaska in 1899 and of meeting J. P. Morgan for the first time. Teddy
Roosevelt was fondly recalled—manly, loyal, robust, a mind as kinetic as that of Curtis
himself. Leitch got an account of the Sun Dance with the Piegan and the Snake Dance
with the Hopi. On February 16, his eighty-third birthday, Curtis posed for a formal
portrait. He still had the Vandyke beard and wore his hat at an angle—no doddering
old fool, this man.

Finally, the pace of memory-collecting slowed to a crawl and the words refused to
come. Curtis complained about his “scrambled life,” a blur of disconnected images
and places, all at the frenzied behest of The Cause. At night, in his dreams, he revisited
the Hopi and Apache, the Sky City of Acoma, the Grand Canyon cellar of the Havasupai
and the sublime isolation of Nunivak Island. Had he really been to these places? While
asleep, he would construct “whole paragraphs in Indian words,” he recalled. These
images came at random, as with any dream; it was his only real escape from the prison
on Burton Way. He was desperate for a new home. “I have to get away from the smog.”
As it became more difficult to summon his past, he apologized.

“This is a bum letter,” he wrote Leitch on July 3, 1951. “I will try to do better
in the future.”

“I am nearly blind,” he wrote on August 4. Now, even the carrots had failed him.
It was the last letter from an epic gatherer of words and pictures. He had written
Leitch twenty-three times over nearly four years of correspondence.

On October 19, 1952, Curtis died of a heart attack. He was eighty-four. It was a national
curse, it seemed once again, to take as a life task the challenge of trying to capture
in illustrated form a significant part of the American story. The Indian painter George
Catlin had died broke and forgotten. Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer who
gave up his prosperous portrait business to become a pioneer of photojournalism, spent
his last days in a dingy rooming house, alone and penniless. Curtis took his final
breath in a home not much larger than the tent he used to set up on the floor of Canyon
de Chelly.

E. S. CURTIS, INDIAN-LIFE HISTORIAN, DIES

The
Seattle Times,
which had shared his glory days as if they were the paper’s own, dismissed Curtis
with a six-paragraph obituary that ran on page 33. As brief as it was, the notice
in his hometown paper contained a number of inaccuracies, including a claim that Curtis
was “Seattle’s first commercial photographer” and that he had gone on the Harriman
expedition a full seven years before he ever met Harriman. The
New York Times
had drafted a lengthy life story when it appeared that Curtis was lost at sea off
the Queen Charlotte Islands back in 1914. When he actually died, the paper ran an
obituary of seventy-six words, and never directly mentioned
The North American Indian.
He was called an Indian authority who also did some photography. The obituary said
nothing of the languages he recorded and preserved, the biographies he wrote of Indians
still alive, the groundbreaking work he did in cinema. Some years later, the
Times
arranged with the collector Christopher Cardozo to sell “limited edition” lithographs
of Curtis pictures, including some of the most iconic—
At the Old Well of Acoma, An Oasis in the Badlands, Chief Joseph
—and thus began a long, lucrative business offering the Indian pictures of the Shadow
Catcher to connoisseurs around the globe.

Collectors were always asking if there was anything still to surface from the Curtis
estate. No, Beth insisted: her father had left this world as he’d entered it, without
a single possession to his name. That is, with one exception, unknown to outsiders,
perhaps even to the House of Morgan, and certainly to the creditors who had chased
him from one century to the next. Curtis had held on to a single set of
The North American Indian,
the twenty volumes taking up five feet of shelf space in the tiny apartment on Burton
Way. Though he was alone at death, and friendless, not a single person in those books
was a stranger to him.