by Timothy Egan
At the end of his stay with the family, Curtis opened his Indian portfolio to the president. He showed him the handsome Hopi men from Walpi, the giggly-faced Hopi women with their hair in those tight flower whorls, the Blackfeet praying in the high-plains heat. In the past few years, Roosevelt himself had traveled throughout the Southwest, seeing much of it for the first time. The Hopi and Navajo dwellings in the Curtis pictures—strong, well-built homes holding to cliffs—were anything but the dingy, transient tents and lean-tos of Roosevelt’s earlier view. As part of his expanding knowledge of the country he governed, Roosevelt was starting to see the legacy of indigenous human life in the same way he saw the natural world—something that would be lost if present trends continued.
The living Indian communities were another story. Roosevelt was influenced by those who believed that tribal ties should be loosened, and natives eventually given full U.S. citizenship—assimilated, like recent European immigrants. The portrait of Chief Joseph, who had also posed with his mouth closed, eyes intense, caught the president’s attention. After hearing Curtis out, Roosevelt said the project was a bully idea, and a noble one, important to America’s lasting sense of self. Without being specific, he made a promise to Curtis in written form:
“No man could be doing anything more important,” he wrote. “I will support you in any way I can.”
In July of 1904, Curtis spent a frenzied few days with the joys of his home life: ten-year-old Hal, eight-year-old Beth and six-year-old Florence. The children hardly knew their father during the first years of the Indian project, Florence said later, but when he was around, the house was full of radiant sunlight. Stories, games, questions, tricks all flowed from the towering and peripatetic man. He renewed his vow to take the family—why not all of them?—on a long trip to Indian country. Soon. Appointments, requests and unanswered letters were stacked all over the house. They would have to wait.
He checked in with Muhr, running the technical side of the studio, fine-finishing the negatives Curtis brought home from the tribes. Muhr had never worked harder. “His example is so contagious,” Muhr said of his boss, “that everyone connected with him seems fired by the same enthusiasm and imbued with the same energy and ambition.” That contagion had spread to Ella McBride, the mountaineer Curtis had met on Rainier a few years earlier. Curtis had talked her into leaving her teaching job in Portland and moving to Seattle, where she became indispensable behind the camera at the studio. She also lived in the Curtis home, and was like a second mother, the girls said later.
Out the door Curtis went again. For the rest of the summer and into the fall Curtis worked at breakneck speed, bouncing all over the Southwest with a small entourage, usually including a few translators, and Phillips. In New Mexico Territory, west of Albuquerque, he arrived at what was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, nine hundred years. Descendants of the Anasazi, the people had built a community on a mesa seven thousand feet above sea level and named their fortress Acoma, a word that means “the place that always was.” Curtis found Acoma in the high-desert air just as he had found Supai in a basement next to the Colorado River—a cluster of people living in a remarkable redoubt, forgotten by the rest of the world. After dealing with Europeans of one sort or another for three hundred years, Acomans were cautiously accommodating.
Curtis was taken to the top, where women drew their water from a deep well and balanced the painted earthen jars on their heads. He climbed ladders to houses of sun-blasted rock. He was shown the cliffs where the natives had rolled giant boulders down on enemies—white, red and brown. They worshiped Jesus and the sun at Acoma, in equal measure, “a positive argument that a people can be loyal followers of two religious creeds at one and the same time,” Curtis wrote in Scribner’s, which published several large spreads of Curtis’s photojournalism. Their prize possession was a silver-crowned cane given them by Abraham Lincoln as a reward for loyalty to the Union. Curtis heard of the three-day battle with Don Juan de Oñate’s conquistadors in 1598, the worst blow in the history of Acoma. The Spanish burned homes, raided food supplies, threw men from the cliff and marched the surviving stragglers off to a makeshift prison in the valley. There, Oñate pronounced them guilty of violating the Act of Obedience and Homage, though most had never taken the oath Spain had forced on the natives. For punishment, every man over the age of twenty-five was to have one foot cut off; those younger were sentenced to slavery. Nearly two centuries passed before the Sky City of Acoma regained its preinvasion population. But people never entirely deserted the rock. They had been written off, like Indians in general; in obscurity, they eventually thrived.
Over several days, Curtis hiked up and down the winding, narrow passage to the summit village, a footpath of rock polished by wear over ten centuries. He shot At the Old Well of Acoma, one of his most Edenic still lifes, showing two veiled young women gathering water with their intricately painted vases. Calm pools of water always brought out the painterly side of Curtis. Near the base of the mesa looking up, he did a different kind of day-in-the-life, called The Old Roadway of Acoma. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, another artist who found renewal in New Mexico, Curtis loved the light in the Land of Enchantment.
Back in Arizona, Curtis went to see his friends in the Hopi Nation, and predictably, the high priest Sikyaletstiwa again rejected his request for entry in the Snake Society. For The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath, this was the third visit to the Hopi. He could watch. He could shoot pictures. And, in a step closer, this time he was invited to climb down into a kiva where priests tamed rattlesnakes in advance of the ceremony. But he could not join the men who performed the ritual.
The Hopi were amused by the latest device to emerge from the worn wagon Curtis had hauled to the high desert: a moving-picture machine. He set up the camera on the roof of a house and captured the choreography of the last days of the Snake Dance. It had been twenty-five years since young Ed Curtis canoed the waterways of Minnesota with his father, the colicky preacher spouting evangelical Christianity, a faith that never caught on with the boy. In the Hopi church of the outdoors, though, Curtis felt something stir in his soul. “Hopi have become a spiritual crossroads in my work, a still place in the middle of the continent,” he said. “These events are beyond words.”
His best work that year was with the Navajo, as he roamed over their 14,000-square-mile reservation under the sandstone spires of northeast Arizona. Like many who spent time with the Diné, Curtis was impressed by their silver and turquoise jewelry, their weaving and their colorful sand paintings. “As the chief human touch of the great southwestern desert, the Navajo are the artist’s joy,” Curtis wrote. He learned, by watching and through translators, that most Navajo families lived in three homes: a summer residence with a big garden; a stone house in a cliff above a wash, where freshets of water were captured for irrigation; and a hogan, usually built of clay, rock, mud and reeds, rounded at the edges. Polygamy was common, but women had superior property rights, owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute—a powerful incentive to stay married.
Threats to these domestic patterns came from federal agents, who were trying to dismantle Diné culture in the name of promoting civilization, and from Catholic missionaries, who were up to the same thing, though using a spiritual carrot instead of a government stick. Defying the doubts of the Smithsonian authorities, Curtis learned enough about the Yeibichai Dance to write up an explanation in his notebook, detailing what happened on each of the ritual’s nine days. If only, Curtis mused at one point, the average visitor could experience the sensation he felt after the sun went down in the Navajo Nation: “There he is in touch with the stillness of the night under the starry sky and sees before him, in this little spot lighted out of the limitless desert, this strange ceremony of supplication and thanksgiving.”
The highlight was Canyon de Chelly. Like Acoma, this stone-walled cavity had known human habitation for at least ten centuries. Though the valley floo
r was nearly six thousand feet above sea level, the weather was moderate enough year-round to make the canyon the garden spot of Navajo land, where rock, sun, wind, water and the ages had produced one of the world’s singular places. A haunt of history hung over the cinnamon-colored gash in the earth—those Anasazi, who had left so mysteriously in the mid-1300s, their well-kept stone houses intact, and those charred stumps of the once magnificent peach orchards that Kit Carson had burned to the ground when he starved the Navajo into submission in 1864. Just as he had seen the hunched figure of old Princess Angeline as an emblematic native of the land, Curtis saw the Navajo in sync with Canyon de Chelly. On horseback, they were dwarfed by cliffs rising a thousand feet above them and by a limitless empty sky. Being there, he understood why no one had bothered the Navajo for so long. The canyon was impossible to see from afar; it revealed itself only when you were actually upon it.
Curtis titled one picture Sunset in Navajo Land, another Cañon de Chelly. But a single long-view photogravure defined the entire Curtis enterprise: Vanishing Race. Seven Indians, perhaps of the same family, are on horseback, trailed by a dog, moving across the canyon floor, no faces visible, a bare human and animal presence against the monolithic rising walls. They appear tentative, on their way out, while the rock is forever and immutable. The title served his theme, but was dishonest to the Diné. No tribe in America, save perhaps the Sioux, had more people at the time, and no tribe had a bigger land base for a reservation. Their isolation had been their salvation; for centuries, no one else coveted the prickly ground they inhabited. And yet Curtis feared for their future as much as he worried about the dwindling cadre of Havasupai living near the Grand Canyon.
He shot more than six hundred photographs on that excursion. “My late trip to the southwest has been a successful one,” Curtis wrote his friend Professor Meany, the only man in Seattle who could appreciate the enormity of Curtis’s task. “In no former trip have I accomplished so much in so short a time.” He dashed off a letter to Gifford Pinchot, mindful of the possibility that the president’s confidant would pass the words on to his boss in the White House. “One of the hardest trips that I have ever made,” he wrote the forester, “met with more trouble from rains, accidents, that sort of thing than I have in my work heretofore, but withal, succeeded in getting a very large amount of splendid new material.” At home, he was given the kind of press adulation reserved for expeditions to the North Pole.
A SEATTLE MAN’S TRIUMPH
Curtis’s ally and publisher Alden Blethen continued to be supportive, ordering up multiple-page treatment for the photographer’s work, with six-column headlines such as the one above. The local kid had shown those eastern elites. “And he went to Arizona, and he stayed just long enough to accomplish that which Uncle Sam, with all his power and authority, had tried for two decades to do and failed,” Blethen’s Seattle Times reported. Three times in 1904, the paper devoted full-page features to Curtis, displaying his Canyon de Chelly pictures, referring to him in one headline as “Explorer, Clubman, Photographer, Historian and President’s Friend.”
Of course, Curtis couldn’t help rubbing it in with the men of the Smithsonian, though he tried to be diplomatic. He still hoped to win their backing, after all. “The longer I work at this collection of pictures the more I feel of their great value,” he wrote in late October to Frederick Webb Hodge, the most sympathetic of the Smithsonian’s Indian experts. Hodge himself had been to many of the places in the Southwest that had stoked Curtis’s passion. A year earlier, when the photographer had begun a correspondence with Hodge, he tried to get him to see the inevitability of the Curtis design. “In the beginning, I had no thought of making the series large enough to be of any value in the future, but the thing has grown so that I now see its great possibilities, and certainly nothing could be of much greater value. The only question now in my mind is, will I be able to keep the thing long enough and steady work, as doing it in a thorough way is enormously expensive.”
There was the nightmare—a sleep-destroying one at that. Curtis would soon be broke. He had spent thousands of dollars of his own money, depleting what savings he had and taking everything he could from the studio to finance four years with the Indians, dating to the Blackfeet summer with Grinnell. What was coming out now as finished photogravures could not begin to cover his costs. Meekly at first, and then more aggressively as his situation worsened, he lobbied Meany to arrange a loan from his wealthy Seattle friends, something to get him through another year or two of fieldwork. How much did he need? Curtis equivocated, then arrived at $20,000. Such a figure. But Meany went to work around town, capitalizing on the good press.
Clara was getting frantic. She did the books, and knew more than her husband that they were headed for disaster. The months apart had nearly made them strangers to each other. They now fought over Edward’s absences, over the direction of his work, over child-rearing decisions and schools, and all the social events she had to reject while her husband was feted by presidents and scholars. But mostly they fought over money. It was his load to bear and hers to live. The partner who’d followed her love across the sound at age seventeen, who’d spent many moonlit nights in alpine camps with him, was losing her husband to something bigger than both of them.
Curtis had to find a benefactor soon, or the entire enterprise would fold just as it was entering its most productive period. He wrote Merriam, Pinchot and Bird Grinnell, his powerful allies in Washington. He wrote the National Geographic Society, the Washington Academy of Science and the mogul who had given Curtis his first big break: railroad titan E. H. Harriman. All were sympathetic, supportive and full of praise, some of it over the top. Yes, they agreed, he was on to something masterful—keep at it! None put up a dime.
Teddy Roosevelt was his last best hope. Curtis sent recent Indian pictures to the president in December of 1904. A landslide election in November had kept T.R. in the White House; he won 34 of 45 states over a hapless Democrat and a Prohibition Party candidate with the unfortunate name of Silas Swallow. Two days after Christmas, Curtis got a letter from the president—labeled “personal”—thanking him for the pictures and praising the work, particularly one Navajo portrait. “Mrs. Roosevelt was as delighted as I was with that remarkable Indian picture,” Teddy wrote. “My dear sir, how are you able to do such work!”
How, indeed. Curtis was the toast of those who looked upon photography as an art form, not an easy crowd to please, prone to mumbled pretentions and caustic insecurities. This circle followed Alfred Stieglitz, the alpha male of sophisticated photography, who had lavished praise on the Shadow Catcher. And Curtis was held in equally high regard by those who saw in the emerging field of photojournalism an incalculable archival tool. Like Curtis, the great portrait photographer of an earlier era, Mathew Brady, had abandoned a prosperous private business framing faces of the famous in order to document an American chapter, in his case the Civil War. Photography, Brady said, could be “a great truthful medium of history,” but also like Curtis, he posed his warriors in positions that suited his views. Curtis was old-fashioned in one sense, sticking with cumbrous, fragile, heavyweight and dangerous glass-plate negatives when easier ways to take a picture were available. But in other photographic realms he embraced cutting-edge technology well ahead of his contemporaries. That same December of 1904 Curtis rented out a large hall in Seattle and mesmerized the audience with hand-colored lantern slides and moving pictures of Indians of the Southwest. The film prompted members of the audience to jump from their seats in fear. The Portland Oregonian raved about the “New and Remarkable ‘Motion Pictures’ of Snake Dance and Other Mystic Ceremonies.”
Alas, though Roosevelt could move trainloads of dirt and make water travel uphill by building a canal in a pinch of Panama land that had bankrupted the French, the imperious and strong-willed leader of the Western Hemisphere could not find someone with enough money to keep the Curtis Indian project alive. What he did for Curtis in the last days of 1904 was to conn
ect the photographer with Francis Leupp, his commissioner of Indian affairs. Leupp could give Curtis a pass to photograph many of the rituals that Leupp’s Indian agents were trying to shut down. Curtis charmed him, and in short order they were close. In the new year of 1905, Leupp invited Curtis to Washington for Teddy’s inauguration in March. Many prominent American Indians—Geronimo of the Apache among them—had been asked to lead a parade past the Capitol on the day Roosevelt was sworn in.
Curtis rose from a short, sleepless night to greet the cold air of March 4, 1905, Inauguration Day, in Washington, D.C. He was staying at the Cosmos Club, once the Dolley Madison House, which had a reciprocal relationship with his own Rainier Club in Seattle; he had done a show of his colored lantern slides for members earlier in the week. He was barely into his second cup of coffee when a well-dressed older man from the club approached him with a request.
“Mr. Curtis,” he said, “I would like to see an Indian and talk to him.”
That so, Curtis mumbled. What else was new? It was the kind of request he got all the time, but especially in the East, where he was often treated like a travel agent with a limited number of visas to the Indian world. Curtis asked the man his business. He was a scholar—of Indian studies. But like Karl May, that popular novelist of Indian stories, this expert had never made eye contact with his subjects.