by Timothy Egan
Curtis found these people very “likeable,” and among the most courteous he had met, of any race. At the same time, Chief White Calf warmed to him. A trust was developing, but it took a great deal of time, much of it spent in silence. His questions often went unanswered. “To ask the Piegan . . . any direct question bearing on the subject of religion yields scant light,” said Curtis. “It is necessary to learn rather from the everyday life of the people.” When the stories came, even in dribs and drabs, the breakthrough was thrilling to Curtis—like learning to swim after hours of flailing in water. See how easy: just let yourself float.
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 notebo
oks, 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.
America was stitching itself ever tighter, through rail lines and roads for automobiles; by decade’s end, airplanes would fly with the birds in every part of the country. At the same time, the Indians who wished to continue living the old ways had to take refuge—to hide, essentially—from the dominant culture. The populous Navajo were spread throughout the north of Arizona Territory, over the border into the sandstone wilderness of Utah, down along parts of New Mexico. The Havasupai, a tiny band, lived literally out of sight: in a deep hole at the western edge of the Grand Canyon, thousands of feet into a slit carved by runoff into the Colorado River. The Mojave were farther south, their lives blended with some of the harshest desert of the world. To find the longtime nomadic Apache, Curtis would have to go high into the mountains and deep into pine forests. He would have to follow the Rio Grande above Santa Fe to encounter Pueblo people who had been conquered by the Spanish three hundred years earlier. All of this was just in the Southwest. If Curtis was going to do something definitive, exhaustive and encyclopedic, he would also have to spend much time on the plains, in the Rockies, in the fjords of British Columbia and Washington State, in the northern California mountains and the southern California desert, in the Arctic.
Curtis was confident he could do it all. He may not have had money or education, but he had robust health, he boasted—he felt strong, always full of zip, plowing through sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Only on rare occasions in the first years did he express any doubt, and then as a way to solicit further encouragement. How many tribes would he have to visit to cover the full scope of native peoples living as they had before Anglo dominance? Twenty? Forty? Sixty?
“I want to make them live forever,” he told Grinnell. “It’s such a big dream I can’t see it all.”
The tribes may have been numerous, but the overall population was plummeting. When the results of the 1900 census were published, the government counted only 237,000 Indians in a country of 76 million people. This was the lowest number ever, scholars and Indian authorities said, down from perhaps as many as 10 million at the time of white contact in 1492. Typhus, measles, bubonic plague, influenza, alcohol poisoning, chole
ra, tuberculosis—the diseases introduced to the New World from the Old rolled across the big land and through the centuries, wiping out nations along the way. If these trends continued, in the consensus view of government policymakers, American Indians could vanish within Curtis’s lifetime. Perhaps he was already too late.
A Piegan Dandy, 1900. The closeness of Edward Curtis to his subjects made for a productive season at the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. That summer changed Curtis’s life, launching his photographic epic.
Piegan Camp, 1900. This was the first time Curtis had seen an entire Indian community, intact and vibrant. He was enthralled.
Snake Priest, 1900. After his first visit with the Hopi in Arizona, Curtis vowed to become a part of the Snake Priest society.
4. Indian Napoleon
1903
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE kickoff at the biggest football game of the year in Seattle, the crowd in the splintered wooden stands craned to get a look at an entourage leading a tall, full-haired dignitary to the sidelines. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was with his nephew Red Thunder, trailed by a knot of newsmen. He was known worldwide as the Indian Napoleon, a field genius who had outwitted the American cavalry and some of its best generals in a 1,700-mile retreat from his homeland in northeast Oregon to the Canadian border. The Nez Perce War of 1877 had made Joseph—a striking-looking man whose native name, Hin-mah-too-yah-la-kekt, or Thunder Rolling Down the Mountains, carried power and music in six syllables—a household figure in Europe and the United States. As the last of the great chiefs died, and the Indian world seemed an ever more distant era, Joseph’s fame grew. Only Geronimo, the aging Apache warrior, was as well known.