Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (38 page)

“Once in a lifetime one uses good judgment in what seems to be the last moment of
existence,” he wrote in a long and passionate letter to Meany. “This was one of the
times.” After the car came to a stop against the tree, Curtis looked below. “Sitting
in the seat, I could have tossed my still burning cigarette two hundred feet down
to the first ledge of the gorge.”

Shortly thereafter, he traded wheels for paddles. They arrived on the shore of the
swift Klamath River, a gnarly old stream that drained a land where pre-glacial-age
forests of northern California mingled with the newer evergreen terrain of the Pacific
Northwest. Hiring two Indian guides, Curtis and daughter moved upriver, negotiating
the riffles and tugs of the Klamath, great fun for Florence. Once, she caught sight
of her father’s face in a moment of uncluttered joy—an image that stayed with her
for years.

The trip paid off with some of his most memorable work from California: Indians spearing
and catching trout in weirs, harvesting water lilies in late summer light, making
huts out of tule reeds. At times, Florence and her old man found a pool of water that
was utterly still, providing Curtis the mirror he so loved for reflecting a subject
on a rock perch. This kind of framing presented a people inseparable from an unspoiled
world—just as Curtis had outlined in 1905. If, back at the government food clinic
in town, an image of short-haired men in overalls lining up for powdered milk was
more representative of modern Indian life, Curtis wasn’t interested. Would an Irishman
in a hamlet on the Dingle Peninsula prefer to be shown trailing sheep or getting a
care package from America? The question answered itself. Curtis was a documentarian
only of a certain kind of life.

In southern Oregon, they chugged up to the rim of Crater Lake, the ancient, lopped-off
volcano that was filled with centuries of Cascade runoff, the surface holding a big
sky at midday. As John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had discovered when they camped on
the crater’s edge, one of the deepest lakes in the world made visitors stop in their
tracks. Curtis also liked the big, sweet-scented ponderosa pines with their jigsaw
puzzle bark. He photographed a Klamath chief looking out at the great bowl of the
lake. It was good stuff, this late-summer work, enough to make for some dramatic highlights
in Volumes XIII and XIV. The first book would cover the Hupa, the Yurok, the Karok,
the Wiyot, the Tolawa, the Tututni, the Shasta, the Achomawi and the Klamath. The
next would include the Kato, the Wailaki, the Yuki, the Pomo, the Wintun, the Maidu,
the Miwok and the Yokut. He delighted in the details he’d discovered: how the scarlet
scalp of a pileated woodpecker was used as the showpiece atop the heads of Hupa dancers,
or the explanation for why the Yurok people would not talk to dogs—they were afraid
the dogs would talk back.

But as he gathered oral histories, building on the work of Myers and studies that
had been written earlier, Curtis could not contain his disgust at the epic of torture
these natives had endured—starved, sickened, raped, betrayed, run down, humiliated.

“While practically all Indians suffered seriously at the hands of the settlers and
the government, the Indians of this state suffered beyond comparison,” he wrote Meany
from California. “The principal outdoor sport of the settlers during the 50s and 60s
seemingly was the killing of Indians. There is nothing else in the history of the
United States which approaches the inhuman and brutal treatment of the California
tribes. Men desiring women merely went to the village or camp, killed the men and
took such women as they desired . . . Camps were raided for men to serve as laborers.
Such Indian workers were worse than slaves. The food furnished them being so poor
and scanty that they died of hunger.” He finished with an account of treaties broken
after gold was found on Indian land. “Thus the Indians became a people without even
camping places which they could call their own. No story can ever be written which
can overstate the inhuman treatment accorded the California tribes.”

This castigation of his countrymen was not just for Meany’s eyes. A very similar
vent was opened in Volume XIII. As he emerged from his blue period, Curtis became
ever more outspoken. Though they had fought in the Great War, and before that made
up a unit of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Indians still were not citizens in the country
some had died for. Tribal holdings continued to shrink, from 138 million acres in
Indian hands in 1890 to barely 50 million in the 1920s. Assimilation was the unquestioned
policy. Reservations were to be sliced into pieces and sold. Tribal links were considered
anachronistic, the customs and rituals barbaric. Indians would blend and fade into
the carpet of twentieth-century America until they were no longer identifiable as
a people apart, until they looked and talked and worked like everyone else.

In 1923, Curtis helped to found the Indian Welfare League, taking up a political cause—with
artists, museum curators and lawyers, based mostly in southern California—for one
of the few times in his life. The group was formed to find work and legal services
for the tribes, and got heavily involved in the issue of Indian citizenship. But as
a one-sided crusader, Curtis often strayed from the script, neither weak-hearted liberal
nor hard-nosed realist. His campaign was a mix of tough love for Indians and scorn
for Washington experts. In a speech in Santa Fe, he said Indians must stop feeling
sorry for themselves. “Self-pity is absolutely fatal,” he proclaimed. “It is worse
than dope.”

At one extreme were government censors and know-nothings, choking the life from native
culture and trying to wash the Indian identity from the people. In Curtis’s view,
these agents of authority should occupy a special place in hell, alongside missionaries.
At the other end, Curtis had no tolerance for people who believed Indians could do
anything they wanted to so long as it was considered “traditional.” He was particularly
upset that men in some of New Mexico’s tribes had sex with young girls because it
was somehow tied up in ritual. Curtis knew that people thought he cared only for “the
old Indian, with no interest whatsoever in the economic welfare of the Indian, his
education, his future,” as he said in Santa Fe. In fact, his work to immortalize the
Indian past informed his campaign for the Indian future. That initiative paid off
in 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizen Act, making native people full stakeholders
in the republic. The tribes with treaties, signed by presidents and passed by Congress,
would remain sovereign—nations within a nation, in the words that came to define the
relationship.

The same year saw publication of the two latest editions of
The North American Indian,
the volumes from work in northern California, Oregon and Nevada. In recording, translating
and passing along the words in numerous tribal tongues, Curtis noted that more languages
were spoken on the West Coast of the United States than in all of Europe. In recounting
the near genocide of the first nations of the Golden State, Curtis was blunt: “The
conditions are still so acute that, after spending many months among these scattered
groups of Indians, the author finds it difficult even to mention the subject with
calmness.” Reviews of the new books were practically nonexistent. Americans, in the
frothy fever of the Jazz Age, had little interest in Indian pictures. And Curtis?
Is he still with us? There was no mention of him in the papers, even after the towering
achievement of the Hopi volume. Meany tried to cheer his friend: Curtis was six books
from the finish line, and should never give up so long as he could draw a breath.

“About the only thing my friends can do is hold a little belief in me,” Curtis replied.
“I am working hard and trying to justify such faith as my friends may have. The problems
are many, however the real work moves on.”

The real work then went into high gear, almost matching the pace of Curtis’s early
years. He and Myers spent the fall of 1924 in the Land of Enchantment, among the pueblos
of the Rio Grande, all the way up to Taos. As the Spanish had interbred with many
of these tribes, by conquest and settlement, some of the faces looked vaguely European,
though Curtis found plenty of fascinating material for his camera. He took issue with
some of the earlier conclusions about these people published by Matilda Coxe Stevenson,
the anthropologist who spent years in New Mexico under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian.
And she took issue with him. “Mr. E. S. Curtis declared to me that to reach the inner
life of the Indian one must have his pocket book overflowing until the money runs
out in a stream upon the ground,” she once said, in reference to the days when Curtis
was flush with Morgan money. Were he a credentialed scientist, she said, this would
have bothered her greatly. But because he was an artist, she eventually gave him her
full support. “Mr. Curtis’s work is beautiful as it is.” Of course, Curtis always
wanted to be known for much more than beauty. Writing Hodge, he and Myers were almost
breathless in reporting that, once again, they would be correcting the record; much
of what was in textbooks about Acoma, Taos and other communities of New Mexico was
simply wrong. This work would fill volumes XVI and XVII.

The next year, 1925, Curtis made a rare business trip to New York. Where once he had
crisscrossed the country routinely, he now did so only for the most pressing concerns.
Jack Morgan had agreed to see
The North American Indian
through to the end. The House of Morgan was now more than a quarter million dollars
into their Indian photographer. Still, its portion covered barely a fourth of Curtis’s
expenses. This final investment would come with a steep price: Morgan raised the issue
of transferring the Curtis copyright to him. More than a decade earlier, Curtis had
lost business control over the project itself when it was turned over to Morgan’s
bankers. He had also given up all rights to his movie in 1924, part of a scramble
for desperation cash. But he still held the copyright to the plates and negatives
of
The North American Indian.
With his latest investment in Curtis, Morgan expected something in return. It was
not a charity they were running. Negotiations would continue.

Curtis headed for the northern plains in the summer of 1925, meeting Myers in Montana.
From there, they crossed the Canadian border into Alberta, with its lacerating winds
and oceans of grass. The tribes were spread over an enormous expanse of tableland
at the foot of the Rockies. Reaching them, getting their stories and taking their
pictures, was akin to going into an area the size of Germany and looking for a handful
of old ethnic-Polish families.

Curtis and Myers traveled to Calgary and then spread out in search of Sarsi and Cree.
It helped tremendously that Curtis had so much prior knowledge from his days with
Bird Grinnell among the Blackfeet and Piegan. The Alberta natives depended on caribou,
as the Plains Indians to the south relied on buffalo. They were nomadic, following
food sources, living most of the year in tipis. The pictures that Curtis took are
stark, stripped of artifice. He framed wind-sanded faces and silhouetted men on the
bare backs of ponies. He shot Cree picking blueberries and Chipewyan pitching tents
in aspen groves. As usual, Myers worked the written narrative. “We were lucky to find
a very good source of information for the Cree and Chipewyan, and pumped it dry,”
Myers wrote Hodge. This work filled Volume XVIII.

The following year, 1926, would be given over to field research for the final book
on Indians in the contiguous United States—the tricky task of finding intact indigenous
communities in the state of Oklahoma. Then the work would close out, in Volume XX,
with people of the far north. Oklahoma was a dumping ground for tribes from all over
the country, with reservation boundaries that were as erasable as letters on a crossword
puzzle. To Curtis, it was the place where native ways went to die. The name itself
is a combination of two Choctaw words—
okla,
which means “people,” and
humma,
the word for “red.” Nearly a fourth of all Indians in the United States lived there,
as Curtis noted. But very few had been in Oklahoma for long, or by choice. What to
do, for example, with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that had been marched from
the South and settled in Oklahoma?

Curtis would concentrate on the once fearful Comanche (known as the Lords of the
Plains), the Wichita, the Southern Cheyenne and the Oto. He told Myers to be in Oklahoma
on May 1, the date of an intertribal gathering. But Myers, a year shy of his fiftieth
birthday, had started to drag. He was married, with a business proposition awaiting
him in California, and had promised his wife a much-delayed trip to Europe. For days
on end he agonized before he penned a painful letter to his boss and partner: “It
is an unpleasant thing to have to write you that I shall not be able to do any field
work this summer. An opportunity has presented itself to make a lot of money in the
next two or three years—a real estate transaction. It is one of the kind that rarely
occur, and I am getting too old to pass it up in hope that another will be at hand
when the Indian work is finished.”

Myers, like Hodge in New York, had been working for minimal compensation, laboring
through the 1920s to help Curtis finish
The North American Indian.
But at least Hodge had a steady paycheck from his job at the museum. Myers had nothing
to fall back on. The country had gone on an economic tear in the giddy years after
the war, the stock market doubling, tripling, commodity prices doing the same thing,
real estate that had warranted barely a glance now shingled in gold. Middle-aged,
with nothing to show for giving his best years to Ed Curtis, Myers felt he had to
leap at a chance to make a deal or two that would set him up for his old age. He had
moved to San Francisco with his wife, and using her money, he had bought a building.
The plan was to renovate it and then sell it for a large profit. But the project would
be time-consuming, leaving little room for anything else. He had no choice but to
quit
The North American Indian.
“As you probably know, the desire to finish the job is what has kept me at it these
last few years on a salary that doesn’t amount to much in these times,” he concluded,
“and only a very remarkable chance could have induced me to drop the plowhandle.”