Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (16 page)

Morgan had only the vaguest notion of what an American Indian was like, but few people
had so altered the destiny of the tribes as had the lion of Wall Street. He had gone
west for the first time in 1869, not long after completion of the transcontinental
railroad. At a stop in Nebraska, young Morgan and his wife, Franny, ran into a group
of Pawnee Indians—“horrid-looking wild creatures with no clothes to speak of,” as
a member of their party recalled. When a native approached Morgan, he beat a hasty
retreat to his private rail car. Later, Morgan’s consolidation of the railroads, eventually
joining corporate cause with E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill, led to a growth spurt
that created the largest rail network in the world. In a short time, the buffalo prairies
and game-rich valleys of the open West were laced with steel roads, servicing all
manner of newcomers and prospectors of property. Buffalo Bill Cody got his start killing
bison for railroad crews. The tribes knew they were doomed when the smoky exhalations
of the iron horses filled the skies of the Great Plains, for an obsidian-tipped spear
could bring down a five-hundred-pound buffalo, but it was worthless against metal-hulled
trains carrying immigrants to Indian country. In a single decade, the 1880s, more
than seventy-five thousand miles of track were tacked to the ground, and nearly three
million people moved west.

No sentimentalist in business, Morgan did have a soft spot for beautiful things,
whether on canvas or fitted into a tailored dress. No art-rich estate or château in
Europe was safe from his wandering buyer’s eye. In 1898, he spent $300,000 on
The Progress of Love,
fourteen decorative panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, commissioned in 1771. Three
years later, he bought a fifteenth-century Raphael (a Perugian altarpiece) for $400,000—at
the time, the most expensive art purchase in the world. He topped himself again in
1902 when he paid $700,000 for the contents of a British squire’s private library.
Books were particularly appealing to Morgan, a bibliophile with a taste for big names.
He owned a first edition of Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
a vellum Gutenberg Bible, original copies of the Declaration of Independence and
the fussed-over manuscript of
A Christmas Carol,
the Charles Dickens classic written in 1843. These treasures were all bound for the
new library.

Edward Curtis wanted nothing more than to be part of Morgan’s collection. In his advance
letter, he outlined the project: “The plan in mind is to make a complete publication,
showing pictures and including text of every phase of Indian life of all tribes yet
in a primitive condition, taking up the type, male and female, child and adult, their
home structure, their environment, their handicraft, games, ceremonies etc.; dividing
the whole into twenty volumes containing fifteen hundred full-page plates, the text
to treat the subject much as the pictures do, going fully into their history, life
and manners, ceremony, legends and mythology, treating it in rather a broad way so
that it will be scientifically accurate, yet if possible interesting reading.”

The last line was central to the Curtis task. Yes, he was creating something scientific,
something artistic, something that would withstand the ages, something that must be
done now!
But as a self-educated product of a new middle class with broad tastes, Curtis also
wanted his work to be read outside the claustral realm of academia. He was not doing
this to be praised by the small circle of Indian scholars, though he certainly wanted
their approval. Most everything scholarly on the subject, he implied, was tedious,
if not damn near impossible to read.

Now, to the money: “It has been estimated by publishers that a work of this nature
would have to sell at five thousand dollars a set, and that one hundred sets could
be disposed of in this country and abroad. To finish the field work will require five
more years at an approximate annual expense of $15,000 for the five years—$75,000.”
There you had it, what every businessman looks for: the bottom line. Twenty volumes.
Five years to complete. And $75,000 total. It would be not only one of the world’s
costliest literary projects, but the rarest of books: the total print run would be
a hundred sets.

Curtis mentioned in closing that he had already spent $25,000 of his own money, and
that while his bankbook was empty, he still had his life to give, and was willing
to put it up as collateral so that Morgan would never lose a penny. “To further safeguard
the patron of the work, I could insure my life . . .”

The next day, Curtis presented himself in the afternoon to make his case in person.
He had gotten this far—that is, through the bronze doors of 23 Wall Street—because
of his connections, though not the political ones. President Roosevelt was a liability.
It was no secret, as T.R. had mentioned in his letter to Curtis, that the “man of
great wealth” despised Roosevelt, and the feeling was mutual. When the United States
first went after Morgan’s railroad trust in 1902, the mogul thought everything could
be settled by gentleman’s agreement. “If we have done anything wrong, send your man
to my man and they can fix it.” Roosevelt replied, “That can’t be done.” Two years
later, the Supreme Court ruled for Roosevelt, and the monopoly was broken, though
Morgan seemed not to suffer in the least. Another man of wealth was Pinchot, the forester
and top Roosevelt adviser who had inherited a private fortune made by his grandfather
in the timber industry. Pinchot also hated Morgan. And Pinchot, while encouraging
Curtis, had turned down the photographer when he asked for a $7,000 loan. A better
ace in the hole for Curtis was the leader of the Alaska expedition, E. H. Harriman.
Not only was Harriman a Morgan partner in the railroad consolidation (after years
of being at each other’s throats), but he had spread his patron wings wide, in Morgan’s
same circles. The year before, Harriman had arranged for a New York show of Curtis’s
work, and invited the influential critics and patrons in the city to view rare pictures
of the “curious rites, ceremonies and customs” of Indians—a bit of a carnival come-on
for the New York elite. It cost Curtis $1,300 to rent the ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel. Hundreds of the city’s swell set turned out, and sales were brisk. Among the
admirers was Louise Satterlee, Morgan’s daughter. The critics raved, elevating his
work to a national cause célèbre. “We are painting our plains, protecting our forests,
creating game preserves, and at last—not saving the existence of our North American
Indian, the most picturesque roving people on earth,” declared the
Craftsman,
an influential photography magazine. “Just one man, an American, an explorer, an
artist with the camera, has conceived and is carrying into execution the gigantic
idea of making a complete photographic and text record of the North American Indians
so far as they exist in primitive conditions today.”

Harriman and Morgan’s daughter had gotten Curtis close to the great man. But to gain
an audience with him, Curtis would have to pass through one more person: an olive-skinned,
sly-witted twenty-two-year-old from Princeton who had been hired to oversee Morgan’s
library and all the literary acquisitions, Belle da Costa Greene. An expert in illuminated
manuscripts, she had charmed her way into New York’s art circles, and left some men
speechless in her wake, with her green eyes and body-hugging clothes. “Just because
I’m a librarian,” she once said, “doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.” Morgan was
instantly taken, hiring Greene in 1905 and granting her extraordinary powers for one
so young; she was given the kind of access to his world that no other woman had. If
Greene did not like a manuscript, or increasingly, a work of art, Morgan would pass
on it. She pretended to be somewhat aloof in Morgan’s presence, feigning resistance
to the lure of his charm and vast wealth, joking that she was the only woman who was
not “a willing candidate for the harem.” She told everyone she was of Portuguese stock,
and hinted at distant royal blood. Curtis was also impressed by her beauty and exotic
background. But he did not know—nor did Morgan—that virtually everything about her
biography was a lie. Her real name was Belle Greener, and she was the daughter of
a prominent black family from Washington, D.C., unrelated to any kind of European
royalty. She never spoke of her father, though he was the first African-American graduate
of Harvard. Light-skinned enough to pass as white, Belle slipped out of one racial
outfit before her twenty-first birthday and dressed herself in another. The new woman,
complete with a package of made-up anecdotes to fill out the narrative, was in place
when she found work at the Princeton Library, and was refined over the years as Morgan’s
aide in New York.

After preliminary discussions with Greene, following a favorable response to his
introductory letter, Curtis was ushered in to see Morgan. As he had clambered over
a glacier to rescue two strangers on Mount Rainier; as he had descended a ladder into
a Hopi kiva thick with rattlesnakes; and as he had sailed to Alaska with some of the
nation’s best minds, five years after he was picking berries and digging clams, Curtis
walked in, certain he could make his way. He was an interpreter, after all, a bridge
between worlds, and he could find common ground with a financier who talked in the
language of Wall Street as well as he could see why an Acoma native lived atop an
eight-hundred-foot-high rock in the Southwest. But, for a moment, he was caught off-guard.

Curtis was prepared for the man’s intense gaze—made famous in the best-known picture
of Morgan, a 1903 portrait taken by Edward Steichen that captured a laser stare that
could crack open a bank vault. And New York associates had given him tips on the Morgan
conversational style. He was not known for being profligate with words, urging one
and all to get to the point. But what Curtis was not ready for was the man’s appearance:
Morgan was grotesque-looking. As beautiful and radiant as Belle da Costa Greene was
on first impression, Morgan’s outward projection was at the other extreme—repulsive,
shockingly so to those who had never met him. The forks of thinning, bone-colored
hair, the ascot, the watch fob, the slow-burning cigar, the mahogany walking stick:
familiar, and expected. But the eyes of a visitor were not drawn to the accessories
of J. P. Morgan; they were pulled directly to his face. His oversized nose was severely
mottled and inflamed. It was like the fog light of a ship, making it impossible to
turn away. Morgan suffered from rhinophyma, which the best doctors could do nothing
about. Women friends had suggested makeup and other cosmetics, but Morgan, after nearly
twenty years of living with his condition, had stopped acting as if he cared. In old
age, the rhinophyma had turned Morgan’s nose into “a hideous purple bulb,” as his
biographer Jean Strouse wrote, and was the subject of constant comment by all who
came in contact with him. “Pierpont’s face is now too terrible to look at,” said one
friend, the historian and writer Henry Adams. “The nose has spread.”

“Sit down,” Morgan directed Curtis. Face stern. No smile. Hands together as he sat
at his desk in a room of buffed teak paneling. The sunken eyes of the financier focused
in on the photographer. Curtis had barely spoken his first words when Morgan interrupted
him with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Mr. Curtis, there are many demands on me
for financial assistance.”

Yes, Curtis said, he understood. As their mutual friend E. H. Harriman had explained.
As Morgan’s own lovely daughter Mrs. Satterlee had implied. Again Curtis went over
the plan, before he jumped to his next argument. He had given Morgan an additional
document, a list of estimated annual expenses. Hotels. Money for translators and money
for his subjects. Food for the crew. Food for the horses and mules. Rail tickets.
Salaries of three assistants: an editor, a writer in the field and an ethnologist.
The Indians would have to be paid every bit of the way. But as for Curtis himself,
he would work for free.

Free! Morgan said nothing at that, but this was as far as Curtis would go. He would
be reimbursed—he hoped—from sales of the twenty complete volumes. They would be priced
at $5,000 a set, and Curtis would have to hustle the subscriptions. Morgan himself
would get twenty-five sets for his new library, or to distribute to various museums
and universities—an impressive gift, yes? Also, hundreds of original photogravures
would go to Morgan. So, for all the hours on the reservations, all the days on trains,
the months of searching for subjects, interviewing, photographing, the seasons spent
squinting into the sun, shivering in the snow and straining in a darkroom—for all
of that, Curtis would get nothing. But Morgan raised not an eyebrow.

Curtis tried another tack, a way to Morgan’s wallet. Here was the thing: this project
matched Morgan’s passions. How so? Think of it this way: the Curtis Indian creation
would be a publishing sensation. The Vatican, the monarchs of Europe and the kaiser
of Germany would want sets. For Morgan it would be an ideal addition to the collection
of a man who owned medieval icons, antique Chinese porcelains and the famed Indian
Bible, printed in 1663, the first time Scripture was published in a Native American
language, Algonquin. What Morgan desired was to have that which no one else could
possess. As he himself had said, the most expensive words in the world are
unique au monde.

Yet Morgan was unmoved. “I will be unable to help you.”

Had Curtis stood up and walked out, as rejected suitors to Morgan’s money usually
did, that would have been the end of it. Meany’s loan was still a pipe dream. Clara
cried that the family would soon be in the poorhouse. And even an exhibition at such
a tony showcase as the Waldorf-Astoria, selling Indian pictures to the New York rich,
barely covered the cost of renting the room. But instead of turning to leave, Curtis
sat in place and went on the offensive. He opened his portfolio and spread the pictures
on the desk of the king of Wall Street. Here was the Walpi warrior. Here was the Chief
Joseph portrait so loved by Teddy—um, the president. Here was the old well at Acoma.
Here were the salmon people of Puget Sound. The more the rich man saw of the pictures,
the more he seemed touched. These faces were as much a part of the American landscape
as a Hudson Valley promontory. Did Morgan think the country could afford to lose this
piece of its past? And, more cynically, benevolence could do wonders for Morgan’s
image. Roosevelt had made the wealthy out to be heartless bastards, the lot of them,
and the progressive mob wanted them taxed at an annual rate of 50 percent or more.
These people, many of them Republicans with personal fortunes of their own, were calling
for the creation of an income tax, of all things—the audacity. If Morgan agreed to
sponsor something historic on behalf of a downtrodden native class, it would do quite
a bit for his reputation. See, the rich aren’t so hollowed-out inside. How much longer
did he have to live? And what, truly, would outlive him? What would be his legacy?
All the carved stone in his library?