by Timothy Egan
What Curtis saw of the Havasupai was not a healthy people. Measles had started to ravage the tribe, killing the young, especially. They feared going hungry after their hunting range had been severely restricted. Curtis counted 250 tribal members. He recorded their language, wrote down their songs on staff paper, took pictures of families living in an extraordinary setting. The way the Blue-Green Water People had fashioned homes into the cliffs of the slot canyon in particular drew his photographic eye.
During the same trip to Arizona, Curtis went to see the Hopi and the Navajo. He tried again to get permission to participate in the Snake Dance. And again the head of the Snake Society, Sikyaletstiwa, turned him down. But the priest was friendly enough with Curtis that he let him take his picture. By this time, Curtis was referred to by one of his many nicknames, The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath, because of the air mattress he inflated at camp.
After a year’s absence, Curtis noticed that natives of the Southwest had changed. Government agents had banned even more ceremonies. As in Montana, children were hauled off to boarding schools run by the missions, where their spiritual lives were handed over to another God. The boys were supposed to learn how to farm and read, the girls how to be homemakers and serve tea. Those who resisted were threatened with a loss of provisions and derided as “blanket Indians.” The Hopi were torn between incentives for giving up the traditional ways and the uncertainty of staying the course. The tribe broke down into factions, and in those villages that had given over entirely to missionaries, it was forbidden to speak the native language. Would the Snake Dance, which was as important to the Hopi as Easter Sunday mass is to Roman Catholics, soon be outlawed? Feeling the sand slipping through the hourglass of his project, Curtis picked up the pace.
He hurried off to Walpi, one of his favorite places in the Hopi Nation. This village was perched atop bare stone on a high mesa, with views of open country below that stretched to the horizon. The sandpaper-colored walls of the houses looked as if they sprouted from the tabletop of rock. Walpi could have been a Tuscan hill town lost to time but for the absence of a church on the village skyline. The location and building style of Walpi gave it two strategic advantages for protection from enemies: it was camouflaged, appearing from a distance to be just another stone mesa, and it was an impossibly steep ascent, making it difficult to attack. In Walpi, Curtis found a Hopi man with feminine good looks, wearing hoop earrings, hair cut just at the shoulders, deep-set black eyes. Curtis had him sit with a simple army blanket around his shoulders; the austerity of the cloth brought out the attractive features of the face. The resulting picture, titled A Walpi Man, was developed as a platinum print, a rare and costly process with superb resolution.
As satisfied as he was with this and other Southwest portraits, Curtis slipped into periods of insecurity, at times panic, pressed by the urgency of time and the drain on his bank account. Perhaps he had taken on too much. He was shooting contemporary photographs, but the pictures looked like historical documents even before he developed them; the present seemed to morph into the past inside his lens. Next year, he wondered, how difficult would it be to find a young Hopi who could speak the language? “There won’t be anything left of them in a few generations and it’s a tragedy,” he wrote Bird Grinnell. “A national tragedy.”
Curtis picked up his gear and raced east, to the White Mountains of Arizona, where he hired an interpreter and went in search of Apache life. These Athapaskan-speaking people were epic wanderers over a broad swath of the arid West. Their name bespoke their reputation: Apache meant “fighting men,” but was also translated as “enemy.” After the Comanche had pushed them out of the high plains of Texas in the early 1700s, the Apache’s mobile societies were sustained by thievery, trading, raiding and hunting. They never farmed. They preyed on sedentary Indians, feckless whites and unwary Mexicans in an area almost as large as Great Britain, from the Sonoran Desert to northern New Mexico. The White Mountain Apache were now confined to a reservation in the juniper- and pine-forested land of a sparsely settled American territory, far removed from any sizable Anglo town. It took days for Curtis, traveling first by horse-drawn carriage and then on his own mount, to find the Indian communities. When he met a stagecoach exiting the reservation, he was encouraged to find a dispirited missionary on his way out—the preacher’s despair was a promising sign. He also ran into a government farm instructor, who complained that “teaching the dirty Indians” to till the ground was a hopeless task. Once among the Apache, Curtis found that Indian lips were sealed. Those well-meaning men of the cloth and the plow had certainly done him no favors—poisoning the well, as it were. Curtis devised a strategy: he would feign indifference.
“I asked no questions and indicated no special interest in more than casual externals,” said Curtis. Every day in the field he watched—from first light until late at night. “They were up at dawn, and bathed in pools and streams that their bodies might be acceptable to the gods,” he wrote. “Each man, in isolation, greeted the rising sun in fervent prayers.” After several weeks, he was allowed to follow Apache women as they harvested mescal, roasted it in a pit and mixed it with other juices for a drink. Still, he was only scratching the surface—an embedded tourist. He wanted detail, detail and more detail. He heard whispered talk about a painted animal skin, a chart of some kind that was the key to understanding Apache spiritual practices. Curtis offered a medicine man $100—a fortune, more than anyone on the reservation could earn in a year—if he would show him the skin and explain what the symbols meant. His bribe was rejected.
“If I showed it to you,” the Apache priest told Curtis, “I would be killed by the other medicine men.”
“If I would give you $500, what would you say?”
“I would still say no. For if I was dead, the money would do me no good.”
Tribal distrust of Curtis was widespread. Apache threw dirt at his camera, charged him on horseback, misled him, threatened him, cursed him, ignored him and laughed at him. They complained to government agents about this intruder in their midst, trying to record the sacred ways. When he left the Apache homeland in August, the rituals were unknown to Curtis, the Great Mystery just that, his money useless, his project among these people a bust. The larger narratives of how the Apache came to be were protected by the medicine men. Yes, he had written down names and terms that he’d heard repeated in ceremonies, but had no clue to their context. The few pictures from that 1903 trip to the White Mountains were taken by a photographer who was never permitted inside. One shot in particular, Story Telling—Apache, shows a half-dozen men at a hillside resting spot, two of them still on horseback. The picture is notable for the detail of the land—hard ground and scrawny trees, thin grass and stone trails—but reveals nothing of the people or their inner lives. He would return.
At home, money was tight. Curtis was bleeding funds, trying to finance an undertaking of vast anthropological and photographic scope with earnings from his portrait business. He had a family of five to support and a staff of a half dozen at the studio. He joined the Rainier Club, the most prestigious in Seattle, in part because it gave him a place to sleep on nights when Clara was mad at him, and in part because of the access it gave him to gentlemen who would pay a premium for Curtis to take their picture. The other way to expand his business was to sell more Curtis Indian prints, at higher prices. He started a line of Indian postcards for the mass market. When he held the first major exhibition in Seattle of his native subjects, in late summer of 1903, people flocked to buy framed photogravures, just as he’d hoped. On display, and for sale, were images from seven years of work among the Indians of Puget Sound, the Great Plains and the Southwest.
Another influential man in town, the newspaper publisher Alden J. Blethen, was backing Curtis with barrels of printer’s ink. A native of Maine, Blethen had come to the Northwest on a visit, liked what he saw and purchased a small-circulation newspaper, the Seattle Times, in 1896. Both men had found their life work in the same yea
r. Using splashy graphics, color, big headline type, broad photographic display and partisan Democratic Party editorials in a city dominated by the progressive strain of Roosevelt Republicanism, Blethen made the paper into a major voice of the Northwest. Curtis gave him perfect pictures, which set his paper apart in a highly competitive market. Full-page Curtis Sunday features, with the Indian photos taking up the majority of space in artful layouts, were a hallmark. In the paper, the Seattle photographer was written up as a dauntless adventurer, going where no white man had gone, living on his wits and his guile, charming exotic natives, proving all the experts wrong. Curtis was physically strong, movie-star handsome and, at a time when the first nickelodeons were being cranked on city corners, artistically brilliant. “He lived Indian,” the Times said in one piece, though in fact Curtis did no such thing. “He was heap white brother.” Curtis exuded an otherness, a dash of the bohemian “He’s an artist,” the paper said, but “he doesn’t impress one as being part of the Latin Quarter, really. There isn’t any long hair about him, nor the stale smell of beer . . . his light yellow beard is a bit of the Du Maurier order.”
Curtis promised he would include the family in future travels in the field; they would all go together, the clan in Indian country. “Joy of joys,” Hal, the oldest son, recalled upon hearing the news. “What a summer that promised.” He was eleven at the time. As it was, the family saw very little of Curtis from then on. In a letter to the Smithsonian in which he tried to impress its officials with the size of his ambition, Curtis said he planned to be back in Indian country in January of the new year, and then spend almost all of his time until the fall on work among the tribes. When his family did see Curtis, his mind was elsewhere. He seldom socialized, despite a surfeit of invitations to the best parties. He was still not on speaking terms with his younger brother Asahel, a photographer with his own growing reputation. And the feud drew in their mother; she moved out of Edward’s house and into Asahel’s.
It hardly seemed to matter; the Indian project had taken over Curtis. He talked of nothing else. “One of us would ask what he was doing or thinking about, or where he had been when he was away from home all day taking pictures of Indians,” recalled his sister Eva. “Most often, he didn’t seem to hear the question, so preoccupied he was.” The majority of his time at the studio, working well after everyone else had left, was spent not on businessmen from the Rainier Club or on the bright young things in silk dresses, but on bringing more detail and light to half-naked figures from the desert. How could a middle-aged banker with a bulbous nose compare to a Walpi native in his prime?
Clara found something in the Ladies’ Home Journal: a contest to discover the Prettiest Children in America. The artist Walter Russell would select from thousands of entries a handful of pictures, which he would then paint in oil portraiture. The contest was a perfect opportunity to expand the Curtis name to the broadest possible audience—something more in keeping with the paying work of the premier portrait photographer in the West. From the studio archives, a picture of a Seattle girl named Marie Fischer was selected as the Curtis entry in the contest.
During the summer following the death of Chief Joseph, Meany asked Curtis to go with him to the grave of the Nez Perce leader for a reburial. It troubled Meany that the chief had not been given a proper memorial. Working with the state historical society, the professor arranged for a white marble shaft to be shipped east, to the Okanogan Hills on the Colville reservation. Joseph, of course, had wanted to be buried in the Wallowa Valley, but was denied in death what he’d been denied in life. Meany, Curtis, Joseph’s widow, about forty members of the Nez Perce community and a crowd of cowboys and their wives in Sunday clothes gathered on June 21, 1905—the longest day of the year, and one of the hottest in the arid midsection of Washington State. A large American flag was strung to four skinny pine poles and stretched about fifteen feet above ground, over the grave, providing shade for the gravediggers. The ritual would involve uprooting the chief’s remains and placing them in a new spot. The digging of the tough lava till was difficult, and done with little fanfare. It struck Curtis how awful the soil was in the sun-blanched reservation and how it was impossible to expect anyone to farm this ground. The cemetery was on a slope above the village of Nespelem, treeless, the grass brown and matted, with a view toward the scablands. This Indian dumping ground was not far from the big gash in the earth that would, within a few decades, hold the fresh-leashed flow of the Columbia River in the largest dam yet built—the Grand Coulee.
Curtis was surprised that no prayers or songs were offered at this occasion.
“Last year we buried him,” explained a Nez Perce in a war bonnet that fell all the way to his ankles. “This time, just move him.”
Suddenly the Indians stopped working and dropped their shovels. They retreated to the shade under the sagging American flag and sat, saying nothing. The temperature climbed. Meany asked about the delay: they couldn’t just squat in the heat of the midday sun of central Washington, a desert that sometimes got less rain than Arizona, with two half-completed holes in the ground. The Indians shrugged but kept silent. Again Curtis wondered about the lack of a formal ceremony. The natives shook their heads. For Joseph, they said, there would be “no Boston Man’s talk.”
After a long pause, one native pointed back at the grave and gestured at the professor and the photographer.
“Let the white men do the digging,” he said. “They know how.”
Curtis rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He chipped away at the gravel and dun-colored dirt, putting up piles all around the grave. “It was no small task,” Curtis wrote. “I dug, pried, tugged . . .” With Meany’s help he lifted the simple coffin from the ground and dragged it to the new hole. It was not yet deep enough, so Curtis went back at it, shoveling into the afternoon. At last, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was slid into a divot in the earth, and Curtis buried him under several feet of Columbia Plateau soil. The white marble shaft, seven feet high, was planted atop the grave and cemented to rock. On one side was a carved image of the chief. On the other was his real name: Hin-mah-too-yah-la-kekt.
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.
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, 1903. Curtis took this picture in his Seattle studio in the last year of Joseph's life. Joseph died, his doctor said, of a broken heart.