Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (6 page)

As impressed as the visitors were by Curtis the photographer and Curtis the mountaineer,
they were equally interested in Curtis the amateur anthropologist. He had collected
bits of mythology and tribal narratives along his picture-taking path, and wrote up
summaries of these scraps of the Indians’ inner world. For decades Grinnell had fought
to save the American bison, using his influential mouthpiece,
Forest and Stream,
to shame speculators of buffalo hides and skulls, the mindless poachers with rapid-fire
rifles who had reduced a bounty of perhaps sixty million to a few hundred stragglers.
Grinnell’s passion for lost causes was now focused on Plains Indians. The Pawnee,
the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne—they’d been pushed to the brink, and their culture was
being erased from the land of their grandparents. In Grinnell’s view, the way to understand
Indians was to become more like them, rather than insist that the tribes become more
like us. He had lived with Plains Indians for twenty seasons, could speak the language
and many dialects, and had published
Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales.
The Blackfeet had made him an honorary member of the tribe. Grinnell feared that
in just a few years’ time, these natives might end up like the buffalo.

To Grinnell and Merriam, departing from the Pacific Northwest after a fortuitous
encounter on the region’s highest peak, this Curtis man seemed like quite the resourceful
fellow. He knew Alaska, mountains and Indians. He was fast on his feet, quick with
a joke, full of practical knowledge, physically heroic.

Over the winter, they stayed in touch. And in the spring of 1899 Merriam made a proposal
to Curtis: how would he like to join the largest scientific exploration of Alaska
ever undertaken? The idea came from the Gilded Age titan Edward Henry Harriman, who
had just gained full control of the Union Pacific Railroad as part of a bigger scheme
to monopolize rail traffic—much to the annoyance of his chief rival, J. P. Morgan.
The deal-making had left Harriman, at the age of fifty-one, exhausted; his doctor
recommended a long cruise. Harriman turned his hiatus into something much bigger.
He strode into the Washington, D.C., office of C. Hart Merriam with a plan to stock
a large ship with the finest zoologists, geologists, botanists and ethnologists and
go forth in search of the unknown. Merriam would organize the scientific party. Harriman
would pay for it all. It was to be the last great exploratory expedition of its kind
in North America, dating to the Lewis and Clark journey a hundred years earlier. Curtis
would be the official photographer.

The steamship
George W. Elder
left Seattle on the final day of May 1899, loaded down with milk cows and chickens,
a well-stuffed library and a well-stocked bar, and 126 people, including two medical
doctors, a chef and sous-chef, a chaplain, taxidermists, guides and the Harriman family.
Curtis was the youngest and least credentialed member of the expedition, and he brought
along an assistant, Duncan Inverarity, a friend from Seattle. Among those sailing
north were the two best-known naturalists in America, John Muir and John Burroughs,
both long-bearded and long-winded, called “the Two Johnnies.” Also on board was a
lanky gentleman with faraway eyes whose name was constantly in the papers: Gifford
Pinchot, a man of the woods, from a wealthy family. At night, the ship’s salon hosted
arcane discussions by the scientists, speaking mostly in Latin, “fearfully and wonderfully
learned,” as Burroughs put it. The German-born forester Bernhard Fernow played Beethoven
on the grand piano. Pinchot went on at length about how the outdoors made him feel
most alive. The Two Johnnies argued, a flutter of white beards and spokes of fingers
poking each other’s chests. By day, the scientists would disembark in a particular
bay, and then bring back all sorts of plants, fish and wildlife to the ship, where
they were picked apart. The
Elder
steamed past the rainforest shores of southeast Alaska, up into Glacier Bay, through
the inlets of Prince William Sound, out along the far edge of the Aleutian Islands,
touching the Siberian shore—where Mrs. Harriman wanted to leave a footprint in Russia—and
then back, a nine-thousand-mile round-trip. No junket, the expedition claimed to have
discovered six hundred species new to science, putting some of the best minds of new-century
America to good use.

For Curtis, the
Elder
was a floating university—an Ivy League one at that. From E. H. Harriman he learned
how to operate an audio recording device, a wax cylinder that could pick up and preserve
sound. It was an expensive, newfangled toy for the railroad tycoon and his seven-year-old
son, Averell. Curtis realized the recorder could be used to preserve the songs and
words of the people they observed along the way. Outside Sitka, the machine recorded
a Tlingit chant. Curtis was closest to Grinnell, an easterner who acted more like
a westerner and who conveyed a sense of urgency about the passing of so much that
was original to the continent. Grinnell was a member of the expedition because of
his knowledge of birds, but he seemed more interested in the native people they met.
These villagers in animal skins and furs were ogled at by most of the scientists,
treated like exotic species or fossilized relics. When the ship sailed into a bay
where women were skinning seals, most of the Harriman elites were repulsed by the
smell and carnage. Curtis waded ashore and spent a day talking to the natives and
taking pictures. The photographs show people who seem annoyed, at best, by the intrusion
of well-outfitted Anglos. There are no moonlit silhouettes, no soft-focus portraits.
The photos have a hard, documentary edge.

The Curtis method was simple: get as close as he could. He worked the same way with
the landscapes. In shooting nearly five thousand photographs for the expedition, he
sometimes leapt from iceberg to iceberg, slipped on polished stones in freezing streams
and hiked to the edge of crevasses. Once, in his canoe in Glacier Bay, he tried to
get close to a heaving ice field that was calving big chunks. Crewmen on board the
Elder
watched in amusement as Curtis paddled toward an enormous, berg-shedding glacier.
He took several glass-plate impressions, then moved in closer. And then—horror. A
calf of ice nearly ten times the size of the steamship broke away with a thunderous
crack and splash, sending a wall of waves toward Curtis’s tiny canoe. “About half
a mile of the front fell at once,” Burroughs wrote. The photographer paddled directly
into a wave, a suicide impulse, it seemed. But instead of being crushed and drowned,
Curtis rode the high waters to their crests—to the amazement of those watching from
the deck of the ship. He lost some plates and equipment, but returned alive, his sense
of invincibility hardened.

The famous men assembled by the railroad tycoon liked the photographer. He was self-deprecating,
brash, tireless, able to handle the repartee of big egos in tight quarters—and certainly
obsequious without being annoying. He was also sincerely interested in learning from
them. “His earnestness, industry, simplicity and innocence are positively contagious,”
wrote William Phillips, in explaining the most attractive qualities of young Curtis.

Near the end of the Alaskan summer, the ship steered into what appeared to be an abandoned
Tlingit village on Cape Fox—a ghostly place to the Harriman experts. But the empty
village was alive in a way the experts could never know. The artwork, the totem poles
and posts, the masks, the carved raven heads and salmon designs were animate objects
to the Tlingit, each with a power of its own. The scientists took hundreds of artifacts
from the village, to the disgust of John Muir, who felt his shipmates were no better
than common looters. These distinguished scholars would never haul away paintings
and statues from an empty church in Europe. The men were preserving culture, they
insisted, not robbing a village. Plundering a native community was justified as a
rescue for the sake of science; the artifacts were bound for museums in the United
States.

To Grinnell, who’d been brooding for much of the trip, the majestic but strangely
empty site on Cape Fox only confirmed what he’d been saying about the inhabitants
of the big land: their way of life was passing.
Every collision between the native world and modernity was a hopeless mismatch. The
Indians were doomed. And here was all the evidence he needed: a dead village, like
a body still warm to the touch. He confided these concerns to Curtis, who said he
also was appalled that educated and celebrated men would steal so many priceless objects.
Next year, Grinnell said, he planned to return to a place that curious outsiders had
yet to pick apart, to take in a native ceremony on the high plains of Montana, and
to do so in a respectful manner. For centuries, the people who lived where mountain
and prairie came together had gathered during the longest days of the year to praise
the sun. Missionaries and the government’s Indian agents were closing in. The Indians’
central ritual would soon be gone, outlawed like the potlatch. Grinnell was privileged
to witness the ceremony because of his standing among the Blackfeet. He planted an
idea with Curtis: why not see for yourself and get it down for posterity? On the deck
of the ship as it steamed back to Seattle, Grinnell made an offer that would set the
course for the rest of Curtis’s life. “Come with me next year,” he said. “You’ll have
a chance to know Indians.”

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1900, Curtis boarded the Great Northern Railroad for a trip east to an Indian land
that existed only in the imagination of most Americans. His train chugged through
a long tunnel inside the Cascade Mountains, out past the glacier-scarred indents of
coulee country in central Washington, straight to the rail center of Spokane. From
there the tracks headed north, nearly to the Canadian border, and then east again.
The train huffed across the Rockies of western Montana, up, up, up, straining to straddle
the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, 5,215 feet above sea level, the highest point
of the most northerly of the nation’s transcontinental railroads. Through the mountains
that would be enshrined by decade’s end as Glacier National Park the train went, and
then down, down, down, a dramatic transition from forest green to prairie brown and
high flat ground to a knot of small buildings, a dwelling house, two hotels, a store.
His destination, Browning, Montana, was a whistle stop on the Great Northern line,
but also the heart of the Blackfeet Nation.

The emptiness startled him. The wind nearly knocked him down. A one-man expedition,
Curtis gathered his cameras and notebooks, his sketchbooks and tent, his sleeping
roll and extra clothes and a wax cylinder recorder. As the dust flew in early evening,
he was met by Bird Grinnell, a warm reunion. It was the Pawnee from the Great Plains
who had first given the doctor from Yale the name of Bird, because he appeared every
year in the spring and then would migrate somewhere when the cold weather came. And
it had been with the Pawnee, in 1872, that Grinnell had witnessed their last great
buffalo hunt, an adrenaline-surged spectacle of half-ton prey chased by nimble athletes
on horseback.

The wind from the prairie, gathering momentum as it swept down from the province
of Alberta, made it difficult to hold a conversation outside the leaky frame walls
of the Browning general store. Curtis could see why a tree was unable to cling to
the hard earth at four thousand feet on the Montana high ground. The men outfitted
their horses, then took off at a trot back toward the mountains, where the plains
buckled up and rose. They were crossing twenty miles or so of buffalo country, amber
fields of grass pocked by hollows where the bigheaded beasts took dust baths to keep
mosquitoes away. But there was not a bison in sight; few had been seen for two decades,
Grinnell told his acolyte. Bird turned fifty that summer, almost twenty years older
than Curtis, with half a lifetime’s knowledge from living with Plains Indians to impart
to the younger man. Their purpose was one part adventure, one part anthropology and
one part mercenary, for both men knew their access to this lost world could fill a
lecture hall later.