Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (12 page)

The next day, Joseph’s widow held a potlatch, giving away her late husband’s possessions.
Over two days, she handed out blankets and baskets, carvings and bedding, beadwork
and utensils, fishing gear and hunting rifles—all his earthly goods. She cried loudly
when she came upon an item that was dear to their marriage or prompted a particular
memory. But nothing must be kept back—all was gifted. At the end of the potlatch,
the Indians tore down Joseph’s tipi, so that nothing remained to remind the living
of the dead man. Curtis left the reservation feeling drained, but also relieved.

“No more will he beg of the Great White Father and say: ‘All I ask is to go back to
the old home in the Wallowa Valley; my father’s home, and the home of my father’s
father,’” he wrote in an account for
Scribner’s.
“His troubled life has run its course.”

In the two years that had passed since Joseph visited Seattle on a rain-swept autumn
weekend, no one could remember what he said in a speech intended to sway prominent
leaders. And the football game, all those white men “almost fighting,” which had been
given so much significance, was forgotten as well. What lasted for another century,
growing in stature with every decade, was the picture Curtis took of the chief of
the Nez Perce during the final November of his life—“his most famous portrait,” the
art scholar and collector Christopher Cardozo later called it. Curtis made Chief Joseph
live forever, and Joseph did the same thing for Curtis. But at the time, Curtis did
not think his project could last into another year without help from the most powerful
man in the United States.

T
HE VIEW FROM
the study of the Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill looked out on a sheltered slice
of Long Island Sound, and it was quieter there on the second floor, though stuffy
when the wind was down and the air heavy with summer heat. Edward Curtis and Teddy
Roosevelt were talking about the West, a favorite subject of this polymath president.
It was not easy to carry on a prolonged conversation without some interruption from
the younger residents. This was as the family wanted it—the house had few boundaries
for age or class. Children were to be seen
and
to be heard. Adults were to play, when they weren’t giving the president some insight
into a pressing global issue. Pets had free range of most rooms, and for a visitor
a door could open to the surprise of something four-legged or feathered. At the dinner
table each child was required to ask at least one question of a guest. In Curtis,
the westerner who had spent the past seven years in places that Roosevelt considered
as iconic to the young nation as cathedrals were to old Europe, the children had a
source of stories about faraway people who could not seem more exotic to students
of a New England private school. What were the Apache like? Why does a Sioux warrior
eat the heart of a grizzly bear? How does a Hopi priest handle all those rattlesnakes?
Are most Indians polygamous? What were Chief Joseph’s last words?

Curtis had many questions of his own. He had learned why a Piegan man would spend
three days fasting before praying to the sun, but he knew very little about which
fork a gentleman was supposed to use for salad at a formal dinner. The East Coast
took some getting used to. Not just the humidity, which made a resident of the Pacific
Northwest sweat through a shirt before breakfast, but the customs and cultures. He
would have to find his way without a translator—more difficult, in some respects,
than trying to crack the puzzle of the Apaches’ eternal secrets. How did one dress
for lunch? Was it proper to swim with a woman, alone? Could he feign interest in the
Harvard debating club? He was lucky to have the Roosevelt family of eight—Edith, Teddy
and their six children—as his guides to the affairs of Long Island. For the only rule
of the summer White House that Roosevelt cared for was that guests not be slothful
or boring. The youngest president in the nation’s history and the thirty-six-year-old
photographer had much in common. Curtis was one of the few guests who knew, firsthand,
all about those wondrous scraps of original America beyond the 100th meridian that
Roosevelt was so passionate about, places he felt were in peril at this moment in
the country’s aggressive adolescence. They took to each other in no time.

“I had found a listener who not only gave his undivided attention to my expression
of thoughts and desire,” said Curtis, “but he concurred as well in my beliefs.” Curtis
lit up as Roosevelt told of his ranching days in the Dakotas, a refuge for a grief-stricken
young man who had lost his wife and mother on the same day. He beamed when Roosevelt
talked about riding an Appaloosa at dusk in Montana, or his more recent journey to
the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt guided him through the rooms of the three-story, seven-bedroom
Queen Anne–style house just outside Oyster Bay. The library was decorated with bearskin
rugs on the floor and trophy antelope on the walls. “I soon learned of his special
gift,” Curtis said. Roosevelt “could read a page of a book at a glance, not a line
at a time like most of us mortals.”

The dining room was informal for such a big house, seating twelve at best; heads of
bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain elk stared glassy-eyed under a beamed ceiling. The
table, Roosevelt explained, had come from Florence, bought while Edith and Teddy were
honeymooning in Italy. Had Curtis ever been abroad? No, sir. Curtis discussed Indians,
and on this subject he could always hold a room. But did he know that the Roosevelt
compound was on land named for Sagamore Mohannis, the Indian chief who had used it
as a meeting ground in the 1660s? That would not surprise Curtis: every corner of
the country had a native name that predated the new one. Two of the nation’s biggest
cities—Chicago, from an Algonquin word for “garlic field,” and Manhattan, from another
Algonquin term, “isolated thing in the water”—had Indian origins.

The year had been especially busy for the twenty-sixth president, who took office
after an assassin killed William McKinley in 1901. At home, Roosevelt fought the major
trusts, making enemies of the richest men in the country. And when the Supreme Court
ruled in 1904 that the president had the constitutional right to break up concentrations
of great wealth that restricted competition, Roosevelt anticipated that J. P. Morgan
and E. H. Harriman (the Alaska expedition sponsor) would use their power to deprive
him of a second term. Abroad, Russia and Japan were in violent conflict over disputed
territory; Roosevelt the warrior had been called upon to act as a peace broker. He
was also guiding a treaty through Congress that would give the United States control
of the Panama Canal Zone, a right-of-way to dig a fifty-mile-long ditch through a
malarial isthmus. He had introduced a term into everyday public life—conservation—and
was trying to get fellow Americans to see that the continent they now straddled was
a fragile one, losing much of its physical character in the clamorous tumble into
the new century. Though he was considered the most popular man in the country, Roosevelt
had yet to face the voters. He was up for a full four-year term in mere months. But
just now he had other concerns. Could Mr. Curtis do the family a favor?
Yes, Mr. President—anything.
Curtis had made a blue-cheese salad dressing earlier, and Mrs. Roosevelt loved it.
She was, Teddy said in a characteristic word,
deeelighted!
Could he share the secret of the recipe? For lunch.

Earlier that year,
Ladies’ Home Journal
had named the winners of its Prettiest Children in America contest; the picture that
Clara Curtis had submitted of a Seattle girl was one of the chosen few, selected from
eighteen thousand entries. And just as the rescue of two distinguished easterners
on Mount Rainier had opened a much bigger world to Curtis, this contest proved again
that he had a knack for fortuitous serendipity. Walter Russell, who was to paint the
prettiest children, had been fascinated by the Curtis portrait of the little girl;
he had passed on the name of the Seattle photographer to the president. And so in
June of that year, as Curtis was packing for another long season in Indian country,
came an invitation to visit Oyster Bay, to photograph the Roosevelt children.

He traveled the length of the country, four full days by train, and then took a short
boat ride from New York City to Long Island. In barely a decade’s time, Curtis had
gone from a homesteader’s shack on Puget Sound to the summer White House on Long Island
Sound. He and Roosevelt had friends in common: Gifford Pinchot, for one, whom the
photographer had met on the Harriman expedition and kept in touch with. A patrician
bachelor with a self-righteous streak, Pinchot was a top domestic adviser to the president
and the nation’s chief forester. Bird Grinnell was a longtime hunting buddy of the
president’s. The naturalist John Burroughs—one of the Two Johnnies on the Alaska trip—was
so close to Teddy that the president would dedicate his next book to him. Good men
all around, they agreed.

Curtis was instructed that his only duty, at first, was to get to know the children:
to play with them, to make fires with them, to race with them, to dig clams with them,
to tell them stories of the West. They were a kinetic bunch, riding horses around
the grounds, whooping and hollering up the stairs, playing hide-and-seek around the
orchard, the barn, the icehouse, the windmill, the pet cemetery. They buried each
other—and the dog—in beach sand up to their chins, and the kids rode camelback-style
on Curtis’s shoulders. The biggest child, Teddy Roosevelt himself, was a believer
in vigorous exercise. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,” he said,
but “the doctrine of the strenuous life.” But that didn’t mean he couldn’t make it
a game. At Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt Obstacle Walk was led by the president, followed
by Curtis and the children. It left everyone breathless on the veranda at sunset.

“I found them the most energetic, vital family,” said Curtis. “They made me feel
at home, in fact like one of the family.” During the day, he foraged along the shore
with Quentin, who was six years old, or rode ponies with Archibald, who was ten. The
teenagers, Theodore Junior and Kermit, spent much of the time with cousins and people
their age. And now and then twenty-year-old Alice would drop by. “Princess Alice,”
her family nickname, was a heartthrob for men of many ages, a high-spirited beauty.
“I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice,” said Roosevelt.
“I cannot possibly do both.”

As thrilled as Curtis was to be allowed into the inner circle of the first family,
and to be chosen to take pictures of the president’s children, he had something else
he wished to accomplish. In 1903, the studio had hired Adolph Muhr, a midwesterner
well known for his own Indian pictures and a brilliant technician. It was a coup for
Edward and Clara to bring Muhr into the fold, for he was the talent behind many of
the Indian photographs of Frank Rinehart, an artist and photographer of some renown.
Once in Seattle, Muhr would never leave the Curtis dynamo. His influence on Curtis
was immediate and lasting. It was his finishing hand that made so many of the Curtis
portraits of the past year memorable. Muhr was the first step in hiring a crew that
could construct the Curtis blueprint. Young Bill Phillips, Clara’s cousin, was already
on the payroll, a full-time assistant. Soon, Curtis planned to add a field researcher,
someone trained in ethnology, and a writer, someone who had practiced deadline journalism.
He also needed an editor for the finished product, though he was still not sure exactly
what form that would take—a book, several books, a permanent exhibition. He needed
translators, dozens of them, in every part of the West. All of this would cost money
that Curtis did not have. No matter how well his portrait business hummed along and
how many individual Indian pictures he sold, the revenue could not begin to support
the ever-growing undertaking. The Big Idea might sink him.

Looking for a benefactor, he had gone east for the first time in 1903, for an audience
with experts at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. In recent
years, they had launched several research projects into Indian country and were gathering
all manner of cultural artifacts for permanent storage in the capital. But in 1903
the Smithsonian came under fire in Congress for spending federal dollars on patronage
hacks and glorified junkets. When Curtis arrived for a meeting that included William
Henry Holmes, chief of the Bureau of Ethnology, they were in retreat. Curtis had been
courting the Smithsonian for months with letters hinting at his grand scheme. And
just what made a dropout from a one-room schoolhouse think he could get the nation’s
top ethnologists to back his project?
Balls.
Those who didn’t try for the highest peak were doomed to the foothills. In that sense,
Curtis had something else in common with Roosevelt, whose most famous words were an
encouragement to take risks: “to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even
though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory
nor defeat.”