Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (8 page)

After several days, the chief informed Curtis that he would be allowed to do portraits
of those tribal members who agreed, for a negotiated price. Curtis could shoot the
encampment, the lodges, the gathering of wood for fires, the horses taking a long
drink in the afternoon, everything but the Sun Dance itself. He was allowed to witness
it, but this ritual could never be stolen by an outsider’s camera. It is the highest
of religious ceremonies, the annual fulfillment of a pledge to the sun. People would
sweat in the lodge, burn sweet grass incense, offer dried buffalo tongues to the sun,
sing and dance. He was allowed, somewhat to his surprise, to record the songs, using
the “magic machine,” as the Indians called his wax cylinder.

The formal Sun Dance lasted five days. “Wild, terrifying, elaborately mystifying,”
Curtis said. “I was intensely affected.” He coaxed a handsome young man to pose inside
a tent, with a full peacock sprout of erect hair, bedecked in necklaces and shells,
cloaked in a light rawhide coat of symmetrical designs.
A Piegan Dandy,
Curtis labeled the picture. One dandy taking a picture of another dandy—there was
a projection of an artist feeling the full surge of his growing talent. The portrait
was eventually processed as an albumen print, in which paper was coated in an emulsion
of whipped egg white and salt, then dipped in silver nitrate before a negative was
exposed onto it—the rarest kind of finish for Curtis. He set up his 14-by-17 on a
tripod close to the village for ground-level pictures of natives collecting logs for
the ceremony. As he worked, Curtis spotted Small Leggins in one part of the circle,
riding his horse at a quick clip, coming right at him. The closer he got, the faster
he rode, charging directly at Curtis. He intended to trample Curtis and smash his
camera. At the last second, White Calf appeared, steering Small Leggins away. The
chief “saved my life,” Curtis said.

The photographer got his picture as well: a wide view in early evening, the tipis
in the circle echoing the triangular tops of the summits in the background. This he
called
Piegan Encampment.
The finished product was a photogravure, from a process in which the image was chemically
etched onto the surface of a copper printing plate—a laborious method used by Curtis
for most of his Indian pictures. (For his best work, he rarely printed an actual photograph
in the traditional way.) And eventually, he even got Small Leggins to hold still long
enough on his horse for Curtis to immortalize him. Another picture from that July
was taken at the water’s edge, where the Two Medicine River, shrunk by the summer
sun, snaked through the grass of the plains. This was a trio of men on horseback,
one riding an Appaloosa, looking away to the distance, the shadows of their figures
reflected in the water. The resulting photograph was called
The Three Chiefs.

Curtis talked White Calf into posing. He was drawn to the chief’s head, which stood
out because he was bald. At the appointed hour, the chief showed up—but he had donned
a blond wig and was dressed in a faded blue army uniform, with a soldier’s hat on
top. Curtis got a laugh out of that, but nothing that was worth bringing to light
later in the studio. This episode with White Calf showed the kind of conflict Curtis
would face time and again, the clash of the old with the new. Curtis would always
side with the old, no matter how much it had been supplanted, because the fast-disappearing
past, he felt, was the authentic. The twentieth century had no place in the nascent
Curtis Indian project.

Near the end of the Blackfeet summer, Curtis told Grinnell his mind was set. He would
embark on a massive undertaking, even bigger than Bird had suggested: a plan to photograph
all intact Indian communities left in North America, to capture the essence of their
lives before that essence disappeared. “The record, to be of value to future generations,
must be ethnologically accurate,” he said. As sketched by Curtis, it was an impossibly
grandiose idea, and he was vague on the specifics of how to pay for it, how inclusive
it would be, how long it would take and how he would present the finished product.
What’s more, after recording the songs of the Sun Dance, Curtis further expanded his
scope and ambition: he would try to be a keeper of secrets—not just a photographer,
but a stenographer of the Great Mystery. And did Edward Curtis, with his sixth-grade
education, really expect to perform the multiple roles of ethnographer, anthropologist
and historian? He did. What Curtis lacked in credentials, he made up for in confidence—the
personality trait that had led him to Angeline’s shack and Rainier’s summit. Bird
loved the Big Idea.

When he boarded the train back to Seattle, on the same Great Northern line that had
opened up Blackfeet land and doomed it as bison hunting ground, Curtis knew he was
taking home photographic gold. The long hours, the respectful silences and the fair
exchange of cash for posing had paid off. He could not wait to show the images to
the rest of the world. A few months later, when his pictures went on display at the
San Francisco art store of William Morris, they immediately “attracted a great deal
of comment,” a newspaper in the city reported. In an interview, Curtis was effusive.
He gushed about how much the Sun Dance had affected him. But the paper made light
of what Curtis considered serious work. “There is just one feat more difficult than
introducing an Indian to the bathtub, and that is to make him face a camera,” the
story began. Dime-store Indians again, plenty of hokum; it was enough to make Curtis
wonder if the public would ever care for his planned epic. Though Curtis had gone
into considerable detail with the reporter about the glory, power and intricacy of
the Sun Dance, the paper described the experience as “five days crammed with weird
customs.”

Back in Seattle, Curtis had to take domestic considerations into account. The project
would involve so much time away from home, from the studio, from his growing family.
Where would Clara fit in? What was her role? She had encouraged Edward to move across
Puget Sound, to mortgage his homestead, to reach for Rainier’s summit, and at every
step she had followed—and occasionally led. But with three children, she knew the
family had to balance the pragmatic with the idealistic. Who would tend to the debs,
the prosperous and pink-faced merchants, those willing to make a special trip from
out of town, waiting months to have Curtis take their picture? Beyond the paying work,
Curtis was already famous among those who thought a camera could produce original
art—what more did he need? This
dream
. . . How would the family live? Time in the field, deep in Indian country, would
cost thousands of dollars, with the payoff well down the road, if at all. Curtis insisted
that he could do both: oversee the studio business and grow the Big Idea. On some
trips, he suggested, Clara and the children could come with him. Her cousin William
Phillips, who lived with them, would be Curtis’s first assistant for the Indian project.
For the studio, he would hire a few more people and expand the reach of his name.
As Clara noted, plenty of the city’s newly rich would pay handsomely to have the name
Curtis etched below their hagiographic mugs. And those people would indirectly finance
the Indian work. Not to worry, the money will come.

“He had a living to earn, a family to support,” Grinnell wrote later in a long article
unveiling the Curtis plan, carried in
Scribner’s Magazine.
“To do what he thought of meant much travel, great expense, and unending toil. But
the idea refused to be rejected. It overpowered him.”

He was home for only a few days that summer of 1900. His family and friends were perplexed:
why the hurry? Because, Curtis explained, the subject was dying. His project would
be a marathon at a sprinter’s pace. Grinnell’s description was apt—the idea had indeed
overpowered him. Off he went by himself, in a dash of camera equipment and notebooks,
clothes and cash and books and tents and plates, to the outer reaches of the American
Southwest, by train deep into the wild, as far as the tracks would take him, to Winslow,
Arizona Territory. Then, by horse-drawn wagon, bouncing and jostling sixty miles over
rough terrain, to a bony, roadless expanse in the middle of the map—Hopi Indian land.
The sky was big, the natives unknowable, the photographer not sure exactly what he
was looking for. He chose the Hopi, and other tribes in the area, because their ancestral
home in the arid Southwest had not been overrun by farmers and town-platters. From
the Rio Grande to the Grand Canyon, there was a high concentration of tribes with
sophisticated views of both the natural and the supernatural world—dozens of nations
that had yet to give in to a larger nation. It was bristly ground, passed around by
Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas and the United States, foreign to foreigners
who were always looking for something like what they’d left behind in old Europe.

And for Curtis, too, the Southwest was far removed from anything he had seen—and he
loved it. He rejoiced in the “harmonious, pastel shades of sand” and the “distant
ranges of lavender mountains slowly transformed into turquoise as the lowering sun
sinks behind them.” He was captivated by the way unmarried women wore their hair in
squash-blossom coils, and by the “remarkable stories of Hopi distance running”—tales
of men who ran twenty miles a day to work their fields. He found a native translator,
put him on the payroll and started in with the questions-and-listening tour, mindful
of Grinnell’s advice, going from village to village trying to make himself known,
but also to blend in. It was not an easy introduction, as Curtis quickly picked up
on the Hopis’ low regard for white people. They resented missionaries, who constantly
told the Indians that everything they believed was sanctified garbage, and they despised
government authorities two thousand miles away in Washington, who ordered the men
to cut their hair or else face fines and imprisonment. “Here they live with the unavoidable
minimum contact with the white race, whom they unostentatiously but cordially hate,”
said Curtis. As he found, it was a recurrent attitude in Arizona Territory.

Hopi communities were built atop high mesas, the homes constructed of clay, rock
and sandy mortar, ceilings eight feet high, walls eighteen inches thick, sleeping
quarters reached by ladders. The heat in the Arizona desert was intense, and few things
stirred at the height of day. The land was the opposite of the green Pacific Northwest;
it was the earth turned inside out, all exposed rock in shades of copper, yellow and
rust. The Hopi lived southeast of the Grand Canyon, near the Painted Desert—an oasis
of earthen villages surrounded by a sea of the much more populous Navajo, their longtime
rivals.

And unlike the Plains or Puget Sound Indians, the Hopi were farmers, sedentary and
dependent on the water that came coursing through arroyos during summer monsoons to
irrigate corn, bean and squash fields. If the water didn’t arrive, the people would
starve. So, to ensure the annual rain, the Hopi prayed intensely during their biggest
religious occasion, the Snake Dance. As with the Sun Dance, this was the most important
ritual of the year for the Hopi. The ceremony could only be performed by members of
the Snake Society, those who gathered rattlesnakes, hundreds of them. Though Curtis
was allowed to watch the dance, as were others who put up with Hopi scorn for outsiders
(including, on his first visit, members of the Harvard Glee Club), Curtis wanted much
more.

“After witnessing the Snake Dance ceremony,” Curtis wrote, “I was profoundly moved,
and realized if I was to fully understand its significance, I must participate, if
permission could be obtained.” He asked the chief of the Hopi Snake Society, a man
named Sikyaletstiwa, if he might learn the ways of the fraternity and participate—with
the goal of shooting pictures. Curtis stressed that he was not trying to become an
Indian. He just wanted inside, to try on the metaphorical clothes of the natives.
The answer—forget it. Impossible, the chief said; no one outside the society could
participate. Sikyaletstiwa told him that if he really wished to learn about the Hopi,
he should come back next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Curtis
promised he would do just that. Before he left, he made a portrait of a snake dancer,
a man of about thirty, a jaunty figure not unlike the Piegan dandy he had shot the
same summer in Montana. This picture, called
Snake Dancer in Costume,
stood out not just for the detail—a full-length, shirtless man, nearly naked but
clothed in mystery, his body painted, shells and jewels hanging from his hair, ears
and neck—but for the look on the man’s face, at once defiant and self-confident, reflecting
the mood of Curtis himself.

“These photographs are not like those which anyone has seen,” Grinnell wrote in a
glowing account of the Blackfeet and Hopi work. “The results which Curtis gets with
his camera stir one as one is stirred by a great painting.” But, he added, “while
Curtis is first of all an artist, he does not think solely of his art.”

Over the next three summers, Curtis returned to the Southwest, just as he promised
he would, introducing himself to other tribes and trying to gain insight into their
lives. The distances were vast. The land was a deeply eroded and vertiginous plateau,
with few roads, spires appearing on the horizon like giant rock stalks—not easy to
travel. It became clear that if Curtis was to follow through on his stated intention
to Grinnell to photograph and document the ways of “people who still retained to a
considerable degree their primitive customs and traditions,” he would have to go to
the cellars, attics and aeries of the continent. The Indians of the East, save for
a few pockets, had been pushed out long ago, starting—systematically—with the Indian
Removal Act of 1830. Yes, a few Cherokee still lived in Appalachian hollows, and a
handful of Seminoles hunkered down in the Everglades of Florida. You could find a
Choctaw or Chickasaw who had refused the forced march to Oklahoma, and in New England,
a Pequot or Penobscot still pulled fish from the sea while living at the edge of a
Yankee village.