Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (18 page)

Finally, Curtis had with him a wide-eyed and worshipful twelve-year-old boy, his son
Hal. He rode on horseback beside his towering father, ahead of the wagon. He delighted
in watching Curtis orchestrate the field team—“directing the activities, looking after
the welfare of everyone”—and was brought into the larger discussion of how to extract
the secrets of the Apache. In all, it was a boy’s dream.

The two-million-acre Apache reservation presented itself to the Curtis party as a
wave of mountains and high mesas, much of it forested in oak and cedar, pine, cottonwood,
alder and walnut, with cacti throughout. The lowlands looked jungled to Curtis, a
profusion of wild grapes and vines, more like parts of the Cascade Mountains than
the whiskered tablelands of central Arizona. This June, the wildflowers had opened
to a chorus of bright color, the columbines in full-throated blossom. Curtis followed
a wagon trail through Black Canyon, a valley of thick-armored oaks that led to a protected
fold of land forking left. Most of the tribe of about two thousand people lived near
the head of the canyon, in a village called White River.

The Curtis party settled in. Their task was to soak up a culture—legends, quirks,
habits, history, diet, sex life, songs, myths and religion. In the first few days
on Apache land, Curtis got sick and was confined to camp, frustrating him. It did
nothing to dampen his resolve. “I have unfortunately been ill,” he wrote Hodge. “But
one thing is certain: at the time I quit the Apache reservation, there will be a good
many questions answered as to the inner life of the Apache.”

The tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine
men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct
American right—everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life. What Curtis
wanted, to watch and record the Apache praying in their customary way, could make
him an accomplice to a crime. At the same time, natives who worked with him were seen
as traitors to their own people. “Old friends looked the other way,” Curtis wrote.
“One of my former interpreters, learning of my purpose, declined to have anything
to do with me, declaring he was not going out in search of sudden death.” His strategy,
as before, was to appear indifferent, “to be just a sucker furnishing the food and
paying for the privilege—perhaps in playing that part I was a natural.” Still, the
enterprise had money in a poor land, no small thing. Curtis drew into his orbit the
cautiously curious and those looking to earn something. And at night, women, too,
came to the camp, and Curtis was tempted.

“Some of the maidens needed no sales argument,” Curtis wrote. He was unsure if this
was a trick—a way to get him arrested—or prostitution, or something in between. Apache
mothers arrived in the dark with their teenage daughters and drew erotic pictures
in the sand—come-ons that indicated the kind of sexual romp that awaited him. Curtis
kept his professional distance from the women, he wrote, while doing everything he
could to get close to those who knew the religious secrets. He recognized some of
the medicine men from his previous work; the incantations were also familiar. But
over and over again, when Curtis asked questions about certain words in the Apache
language, he was rebuffed with a single refrain:

“We don’t know.”

Then what about a symbol, he would ask—why was it drawn in such a way?

“To make it look pretty.”

At night, staring at the starry infinity of the Arizona sky, young Hal wondered about
the Indian explanation for the twinkling overhead. Inspired by his father, he said,
“I will get the Indian boys to talk with me about all of this.” But he had no more
luck than did his dad.

By July, after six weeks in Apache country, Curtis had little to show. “We had only
succeeded in building up a wall of tribal reticence. Every member of the tribe understood
that no one was to talk to us, and a delegation of the chiefs had visited the Indian
agent in charge, demanding that I leave the reservation.”

Facing banishment, Curtis promised to close up shop soon—but kept the departure date
uncertain. “Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.” At the same time, he narrowed his quest
to a single medicine man, named Goshonné. In the predawn darkness Curtis and a translator
crawled through the brush to spy on Goshonné as he chanted. It was beautiful, a morning
prayer that moved Curtis. He went again and again to listen. Though Curtis was a religious
voyeur on his stomach in the dust, he felt his actions were justified because the
world had so miscast Apaches as pagans. One day, at the close of prayer, Curtis sprang
from the bushes and revealed himself. Goshonné was upset, angry and threatening—how
dare this white man spy on him? He was a respected elder, and also had spent time
in jail for openly practicing medicine man pharmacology.

Curtis expressed sympathy. He had watched Goshonné to learn from him, not to report
him. He raged against the Indian Religious Crimes Code, a cultural bulldozer scraping
away centuries of tradition. And, in a naked appeal to Goshonné’s needs beyond the
spiritual realm, Curtis offered a sizable financial prize for the medicine man’s knowledge.
Over cigarettes, the two men talked for several days. Near the end of their negotiations,
Goshonné took frequent steam baths and plunges into the White River. Curtis wondered:
what was
that
about? Go­shonné explained that he was trying to cleanse himself. For Curtis, this
was a good thing: it meant he was getting ready to share insider knowledge with an
outsider. In the end, it was not the force of Curtis’s personality that nudged Goshonné
along; it was the cash.

A few days earlier, for a substantial fee, Curtis had been allowed to take pictures
of a deerskin scroll holding symbols of the Apache creation myth—a page from a bible,
essentially. This was a huge step. But only a medicine man could explain the drawings
on the skin. When the deal with Goshonné was completed, he took Curtis and a translator
to a secluded place in the woods and talked for half a day, answering their questions
in a slow and deliberate manner. Curtis made audio recordings and filled several notebooks.
Back in camp, he was gleeful: the tribal secrets—a complex and lengthy description
of how the world came to be—were out.

In addition, Curtis learned many everyday things from his stay. A full-blooded Apache
never took a scalp. Their language, an Athapaskan dialect, had no profanity. The Apache
feared the dead, for ghosts could exact revenge. Their diet was mixed—piñon nuts,
acorns, mescal pulp, juniper berries and the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, supplemented
by protein from wild turkey, antelope, deer, rabbit, quail. Eating bear or fish was
forbidden. Water containers were made of woven sumac coated in piñon gum. Tribal government
was weak or nonexistent. The medicine man had more influence than anyone, and was
a keeper, until death, of the skin that explained how people came to be. After this
season with the Apache, what Curtis wanted the world to know was the opposite of what
he had been told at the Smithsonian, which was peddled in almost any story written
about the tribe. “The Apache is inherently devoutly religious; his life is completely
molded by his religious beliefs,” Curtis wrote in his first volume of
The North American Indian.
“From the morning prayer to the rising sun, through the hours, the days, and months—throughout
life itself—every act has some religious significance.”

The breakthrough with Goshonné opened the way for the pictures. At last—faces.
Apache Girl,
bare-shouldered, her skin just above the nipple of her left breast exposed to soft
light, was memorable.
Das Lan,
a medicine man who was a rival of Goshonné’s, posed for Curtis with a scholarly stare.
Alchise
is a thin-faced, cerebral-looking Apache chief in early middle age, his face illuminated
by midday sun.
Bathing Pool
and
By the Sycamore
show people as an integral part of the land. Depicting a woman harvesting food,
Cutting Mescal
is a Southwest version of Curtis’s
The Clam Digger.
A motion-blurred platinum print,
Before the Storm,
is extraordinary for the multiple messages in the frame: four Indians on horseback
moving away from the camera, a lone face looking back, a foreboding sky overhead,
wind-rustled yucca plants in the foreground, all shot from a low angle. And the trophy
that Curtis most wanted the public to see:
Sacred Buckskin,
which was hand colored in the finish.

“I think I can say that the Apache work has been quite successful—far more than I
had hoped for,” Curtis wrote Hodge. But it came at a price. In trying to extract secrets
of a religion for a public that doubted whether the Apache even had one, Curtis had
disrupted the sacred rhythms. Just as Curtis was packing to leave the White Mountain
reservation, Goshonné showed up in camp. He was twitchy, breathless, ashen-faced,
angry at himself and at Curtis. The outsiders’ mood darkened immediately, from triumph
to edgy second-guessing.

“I am sorry I talked,” said Goshonné.

“Why?”

“Spies watched us and know my words have gone to the white man. My words are on the
white man’s paper and I cannot take them back.” Curtis tried to reassure him; he would
never reveal that it was Goshonné who had collaborated. No, no, Curtis did not understand—the
word was already out about the medicine man’s role. They knew. Goshonné trembled,
visibly afraid, cursing himself for betraying his people and their gods.

“My life will be short,” he said over and over, shaking his head, his fists clenched.
“All the medicine men have said it.”

Not long after Curtis returned to Seattle, after he had brought the faces of the Apache
to life in his studio, he received word that Go­shonné had died an early death, cause
unknown.

North, about fifty miles from the Apache village, Curtis steered his covered wagon
into Gallup, New Mexico Territory, answering the call of a long-delayed family obligation.
Curtis had been on the road constantly since he set off with the Harriman expedition
in 1899. Even by the standards of the late exploration era, when men would leave their
loved ones for years at a time, Curtis was an absentee father and husband. When he
dropped by his home in Seattle, Clara would greet him with silence or forced indifference,
the children remembered. Questions about his fidelity followed.

Curtis admitted to having a mistress, an insatiate one—
The North American Indian.
Everything else was secondary. He certainly shared with Alfred Stieglitz an obsession
with perfection. “Nearly right,” Stieglitz once said, “is child’s play.” But Curtis
wanted to be a father, as evidenced by his attempt to bring the children to him, even
if he couldn’t go to them, even if he was not there for birthdays or by a bedside
when a child fell sick. Clara the teenager had nursed Curtis back to health after
he mangled his back. Clara the woman had been mother to three children, the keeper
of schedules, the provider of clothes and food, getting them all off to school, doctors’
appointments and baseball games, all of it. Clara the manager had held the studio
together on nights when bill collectors came calling and days when
tout
Seattle wanted a tour. And she had to put up with the questions from friends and
neighbors.
Where is he now?
At times, she didn’t know. Was he in Montana with the Crow, or in the Dakotas with
the Sioux, or in Wyoming with the Assiniboin? And how was the Curtis clan going to
make ends meet while the Shadow Catcher worked for free and the portrait business
languished? He offered reassurances, a kiss on the cheek, a hug for each child, and
then, as always, rush rush rush out the door and down to the train station, away to
other families.

Throughout 1906, Curtis tried to save his marriage. The magnificent early months
of that year—the meeting with Morgan, exhibitions in Washington and New York, parties
with well-heeled lovers of his “art,” the wedding of Alice Roosevelt, a lecture in
Pittsburgh at the Carnegie gallery, a trip to Boston to set up copper-plate engravings
by John Andrew & Son—had all been with Clara. They shared those best of times; she
was in on the creation, the act of becoming Edward S. Curtis. He had shown her the
part of his world that included the East Coast power brokers. And now, as he greeted
Clara and the children at the train terminal in New Mexico, he finally had a chance
to show her the other part of his life.

By horseback and wagon, the Curtis family and
The North American Indian
entourage traveled from Gallup over barren terrain, through the high reaches of a
stubby piñon forest, then to a treeless desert, past mesas and over arroyos, to the
town of Chinle in the heart of the Navajo Nation. The mobile family photography project
was weighted down with tents, bedding, food, cooking stoves, a typewriter, hundreds
of reference books, trunks of clothes, a motion-picture camera and the small glass-plate
equipment now used by Curtis for his 6½-by-8½-inch cameras. His road load was about
a thousand pounds, and his animal team comprised eight horses. In Chinle, perched
on the edge of Canyon de Chelly, Curtis met up with the trader Charlie Day, who grew
up with the Navajo and was fluent in their language. Day chafed at the way officials
from the Indian agency were treating his neighbors. As with the Hopi, Apache and Blackfeet,
people in this most populous of Indian nations, living on a reservation about the
size of Virginia, were jailed, sometimes without trial, for the crime of practicing
native life at its fullest. At the same time, they were encouraged to become dependent
on a government that did not have their best interests at heart. Day wrote President
Roosevelt to complain. And when Curtis approached him for a second season as translator,
Day told Curtis to get written permission before he agreed; he was worried they would
be arrested.