Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (45 page)

Twenty years after Curtis died, a rumor spread through the circle of art-photography
collectors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that somebody in Boston was sitting on an extraordinary
treasure for bibliophiles. Karl Kernberger, a photographer with eclectic taste and
a love of the Southwest, traveled east to have a look. Downstairs in the venerable
Lauriat’s bookstore he picked his way through an enormous cache of the Indian work
of Edward S. Curtis. The owner, Charles E. Lauriat Jr., had survived the sinking of
the
Lusitania
by a German U-boat in 1915, an act of war that killed 1,198 people. His ongoing passion
was for rare books, and he had no better find than the Curtis material he had bought
for $1,000 from the Morgan Library during the Depression. Lauriat was an enthusiastic
seller of this work, reassembling volumes into complete sets and retailing individual
pictures, but his death in 1937 put an end to widespread dissemination. The images,
the many bound books and loose plates, gathered dust until Kernberger’s arrival in
the early 1970s. At the same time, mainstream America was embracing Indians as never
before. Some of the enthusiasm was trendy and silly, but much of the reappraisal amounted
to a fresh, more nuanced and humane narrative of the first people. The times had caught
up with Curtis.

What Kernberger discovered was a mother lode: more than 200,000 photogravures and
the priceless copper gravure plates that Curtis had used to publish his magnum opus.
Over the years, a handful of prints and gravures had trickled onto the market. Some
came from among the 272 bound sets of
The North American Indian
that had been sold by subscription and Lauriat’s later efforts. Many of these had
been picked apart—that is, the volumes were broken up and the gravures offered piecemeal.
But all of this material was nothing compared to what was in the bookstore’s basement.

Back in New Mexico, Kernberger talked a few friends and investors into joining him,
and together they purchased the lot from Lauriat’s and moved it to Santa Fe. Their
gallery shows were mobbed. The Morgan Library had a similar reception when it gave
a big public exhibition of some Curtis material that it had had in storage for decades.
Reprints, lithographs and gravures circulated widely in galleries, and coffee-table
books for the art market appeared. Eventually Kernberger’s group sold the master copper
plates, which then passed through several more hands before settling in the current
home of a pair of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

When a collector in Austin, Texas, named Lois Flury saw her first Curtis pictures
in the early 1970s, it changed the course of her life. “The work was very moving,”
she said. “I thought it was wonderful, fabulous, original and so different from contemporary
art photographs.” She purchased several gravures. Flury and her husband eventually
moved to Seattle, where they opened a gallery devoted to the work of Curtis, a few
blocks from the studio where Princess Angeline was charmed by a dashing young man.
As the new gallery opened, the last Curtis studio aide died; Imogen Cunningham was
ninety-three. She had refined a style that made her one of the best-known picture
artists of the day, celebrated, alongside Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, as a giant
in her field. Another acolyte, Ella McBride, had continued to climb mountains and
pursue those perfect moments of a photographer’s art through much of the twentieth
century. After opening her own studio in Seattle, she became internationally famous
for her floral pictures, particularly in Japan. McBride died in 1965, two months shy
of her 103rd birthday. In old age Curtis had said, “She was my star.”

In the forty years following the discovery in Lauriat’s basement, the value of all
work by Curtis has steadily risen. A single photogravure of Chief Joseph, for example,
sold for $169,000 in 2010. A full set of the bound twenty volumes is exceedingly difficult
to find; they rarely change hands. Most are held by institutions—universities and
libraries in Europe and the United States. About every five years one will come up
for auction. In 2005, a set sold at Christie’s for $1.4 million, “a new record for
a photographic lot,” as
Artnet.com
reported. A partial set of sixteen volumes sold for more than $1 million at a Swann’s
auction in 2007. It was one of the highest prices paid for a book that year, following
such items as the Magna Carta and J. K. Rowling’s handwritten manuscript of a Harry
Potter book. A private sale in 2009, at the time of the worst economic crisis since
the Great Depression, brought the highest price yet for a single Curtis set—$1.8 million.

Flury came to know three of the surviving Curtis children, and found them full of
fond memories of their father, the Shadow Catcher. She was informed of the books that
Curtis had kept and then passed on to Beth. After Beth died in 1973, the family set
of
The North American Indian
went to Manford Magnuson, her husband. Another child, Florence Curtis Graybill, who
spent that memorable summer in California with her father in 1922 and later talked
him into writing and recording bits of his life story, died in 1987, at the age of
eighty-eight. The oldest, Harold Phillips Curtis, outlived all his siblings: he passed
away in 1988, at the age of ninety-five. Flury was concerned, as was Magnuson, that
the family set might be broken up and sold in parts after the children’s generation
had passed. Just before Magnuson’s death in 1993, Flury found a buyer: the Rare Books
Library at the University of Oregon.

“So that’s where the Curtis family set is now—a good home at the University of Oregon,”
she told me. Hardly a week goes by when Flury doesn’t run into someone at her gallery
whose view of Indians was changed by looking into faces frozen by Curtis’s camera.
“For posterity,” she said, “he has given us images of who they really were.”

This view is shared by many natives. After purchasing an original edition of Volume
XII, devoted entirely to the Hopi, that tribe used the book to build and solidify
its teachings, traditions and language. The Hopi found the alphabet and the accompanying
song lyrics crucial tools in teaching words that nearly disappeared. When I visited
them in the summer of 2011, tribal leaders talked about an ongoing renaissance of
the old ways: in schools, among community groups, on websites and through social networks,
and said that nearly half of all members of the Hopi Nation in Arizona can now speak
some of the language.

Similarly, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma uses smartphones and tablet computers to
teach a language that is now widely known by young tribal members. In Montana, Carol
Murray, director of the Tribal History Project at Blackfeet Community College, found
that Curtis pictures of her people were a good way to connect students to their ancestors.
Murray has a special attachment to the images: she’s a descendant of several subjects.
At Canyon de Chelly, now a protected monument run jointly by the National Park Service
and the Navajo Nation, and staffed mostly by native people, Curtis’s photograph of
the valley floor is on prominent display at the visitor center. When the Makah of
the far northwestern shore set out to revive whale hunting in 1999 as a bridge to
their past, they had trouble finding anyone alive with memory of the practice. They
relied on pictures by both Curtis brothers, and the text from Volume XI, as a guide
to reconstructing the ritual of the hunt. Starting in 1988, and every summer thereafter,
Coast Salish tribes from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to southern Puget Sound
have taken to the water to paddle from one Indian homeland to the other. To replicate
the original cedar vessels for their first summer sea journey, they relied on Curtis’s
photos and the war canoes in his 1914
Head-Hunters
movie. During Washington State’s centennial celebration in 1989, the
Seattle Times
’s art critic Delores Tarzan Ament said that the twenty-volume work of Edward Curtis
is to photography what Wagner’s Ring Cycle is to opera—a view shared by museum curators
and scholars of art and native studies.

Yet modern appreciation of Curtis by critics and in Indian country, and the rise in
financial value of his photography throughout the world, did prompt an inevitable
backlash. Starting in the 1980s, a handful of academics and revisionists complained
that Curtis’s subjects were not authentic, that he had posed them and sometimes asked
them to change from their everyday overalls and collared shirts into buckskin leggings
and war bonnets. They said Curtis dwelled too much on the past. Where were the pictures
of hunger and privation on the reservation? Why not show Indians in school or an office?
Why not show them receiving handouts? Curtis had heard these objections during his
lifetime, and he pled guilty to all—with a shrug. His goal was to capture native people
as they were before their cultures were too diluted. For more than thirty years his
main concern and competitor in this project was time itself. As he said often, every
day meant the passing of some person who held knowledge that might disappear entirely.
Near the end, he feared that most of the Indian world would eventually look as Oklahoma
did to him in the 1920s—a people utterly remade by others.

“Many of them are not only willing but anxious to help,” he told the
New York Times
in 1911. “They have grasped the idea that this is to be a permanent memorial of their
race, and it appeals to their imagination. Word passes from tribe to tribe about it.
A tribe that I have visited and studied lets another tribe know that after the present
generation has passed away men will know from this record what they were like and
what they did, and the second tribe does not want to be left out.” As for the posing—yes,
he never denied staging some things. Many ceremonies, from the Sun Dance of the Piegan
to the Snake Dance of the Hopi, were photographed as they were, in real time, with
Curtis doing nothing to influence them. Others were done for his camera. But in those
cases, it took months, sometimes years, working with Indian interpreters such as Alexander
Upshaw to validate a story before he would use it or photograph an illustration of
it. “Indians delight in stringing people along . . . and filling them with ridiculous
stories,” Curtis said in that
Times
profile. One reason why his project took so long to complete, requiring visit after
visit, year after year, to the same tribes, was because of Curtis’s oft-stated mission
to get it right. “In dealing with Indians, grandstand plays should be avoided,” he
said. “One must be just simple, just quiet and as unostentatious as possible. Keep
your dignity and stand on it. Make friends with the dogs.”

Beyond the discussion of whether the bulk of his work is documentary or art or some
combination, his best illustrations defy categories and connect with the heart.

The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel
House Made of Dawn,
had just finished writing a story taken from his ancestors’ oral tradition when he
saw a Curtis picture of Plains Indians on horseback dragging a travaux. “It struck
me with such force that it brought tears to my eyes,” he wrote in
Sacred Legacy,
a book of Curtis pictures published in 2000. “I felt that I was looking into a memory
in my blood. Here was a moment lost in time, a moment I had known only in my imagination,
suddenly verified, an image immediately translated from the mind’s eye to the picture
plane.” He summarized the photographer’s output this way: “Taken as a whole, the work
of Edward Curtis is a singular achievement. Never before have we seen the Indians
of North America so close to the origins of their humanity, their sense of themselves
in the world, their innate dignity and self-possession.”

I heard this kind of praise in much of the Indian country I visited over the course
of researching this book. I traveled to nearly every tribal homeland that Curtis had
gone to for
The North American Indian.
People were effusive about the pictures themselves, with good reason: Curtis took
more than 40,000 of them. But he also recorded those 10,000 songs, wrote down vocabularies
and pronunciation guides for 75 languages, and transcribed an incalculable number
of myths, rituals and religious stories from oral histories. Only in recent years
has the scope and depth of Curtis’s scholarship come to be appreciated.
The North American Indian,
the monumental work of a self-educated man, “almost certainly constitutes the largest
anthropological enterprise ever undertaken,” noted Mick Gidley, a professor of American
literature who has written extensively about Curtis.

Perhaps that is an overstatement, but not by much. Also, Curtis was the first person
to conduct a thorough historical autopsy of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, from
both the Indian side and that of the cavalry. His work was eyewitness history, taken
from survivors of the battle. Under pressure from Custer’s widow, Libbie, who lived
to be ninety-one, and following the concerns expressed by President Theodore Roosevelt,
Curtis had held back on his most explosive revelations. But these insights are now
available in a bound volume at the Library of Congress, and have proven to be an invaluable
resource for modern historians. In his 2010 book on the battle, Nathaniel Philbrick
credits Curtis for seeking out so many witnesses, and generally sides with Curtis’s
view of the battle.

In the Land of the Head-Hunters,
a source of so much heartbreak for Curtis, has undergone a similar revival. After
being pulled from theaters because of legal disputes, it vanished for thirty-three
years. Curtis had sold all rights, and given away the master print, for a pittance.
In the late 1940s, the Field Museum in Chicago came into possession of the scratched,
corroded and faded movie. When it was screened, the nitrate film caught fire, forcing
an evacuation. The flames were doused, but not without further damage. In 1973, the
art historian Bill Holm, an expert on Coast Salish culture, and the anthropologist
George Quimby, who had worked on the film in Chicago, released a restored and restructured
version, titled
In the Land of the War Canoes.
They had spent seven years putting the film back together. It was praised as a landmark,
and given its due for documentary realism and for the pioneering use of an all-Indian
cast. Curtis “took considerable artistic license,” a University of British Columbia
scholar told film critic William Arnold in 2008, but he “got most things right.” In
particular, he lauded Curtis for filming ceremonies that were outlawed by the potlatch
prohibition laws, which were not repealed until 1951. On a spring evening in 2008,
a restored version of the film made a second debut, and proved to be a highlight of
the Seattle International Film Festival. It was shown at the Moore Theatre, where
Curtis had copremiered it back in 1914. The cleaned-up film was presented with a live
performance of its original orchestral score and a dance recital by Indian descendants
of the cast. Today the movie is held by the Library of Congress, part of its National
Film Registry, where it is recognized for its “cultural, historic and aesthetic” value.