Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  He took pictures not just in the low-angled light of dawn and dusk, when “nearly right” was easy enough. Each hour of the sun could produce a different effect. He waited for opportune weather. And he never used a flash, at least not in the Southwest. “Conditions cannot be changed,” Curtis explained. “I must fit myself to them.”

  One day in August, the canyon suddenly emptied of Indians, and a stillness fell over the big crack in the earth. Charlie Day told the family to stay close to camp and await his word. At night, the children heard chants bouncing along the thousand-foot-high walls around them. The chants lasted till dawn, though they saw no people. Curtis was at a loss to explain. When Day returned late at night, he said they were in trouble—they, the Anglos. A woman was trying to give birth not far from the Curtis encampment, but it was going badly. She was deep in labor, in terrible pain, bleeding profusely, but the infant would not emerge. Medicine men were summoned. They tried traditional remedies, to no avail. Then the Indians diagnosed the problem: it was the presence in the canyon of white people taking pictures. Curtis immediately woke his family and started heaving gear into the wagon. He told them they must leave immediately.

  Groggy children snuggled in the wagon, their mumbled questions met by a shush from their father. Horses were hitched in the dark as the chanting continued. Flee, Charlie Day ordered—quickly and quietly, and do not make contact with anyone along the way.

  “Pray the baby will live,” said Day. “There is no power on earth that will save you and your family if it should die.”

  He was exaggerating, surely, but as a cautionary measure. For the first time in nearly eight years of concerted forays into Indian country, Curtis felt helpless and afraid, at the mercy of his photo subjects. The family rode out of the canyon, a long, tremulous climb, and made their way to Chinle, where word came through Day’s contacts that the baby had lived. But what had started so blissfully for the family now broke down in a prolonged spat between Curtis and his wife. The children’s lives had been put at risk. How could he have done that? Great Mystery indeed. What did he really know about these people? Curtis had no answers; it was a freakish thing, forget it. They would reassemble again in another part of Indian country, next year, and the year after. Let’s not let this one episode ruin the good days. But Clara was adamant: never again would the entire family travel to Indian land. With the start of school approaching, Clara and the children left for Seattle. Curtis stayed behind.

  “Everything has to be kept on the move,” he said.

  On to Third Mesa, in the Hopi Nation, where Curtis was in search of the Snake Society once more. Crossing scabbed and pockmarked tableland in late summer was full of peril. Washes, often bone-dry, could fill with red water in a flash, enough to float the wagon. Coming from the maritime Northwest, where rain fell as soft and persistent mist, Curtis was not used to such muscular meteorological mood changes. “The rain pours down,” he said. “What was an arid desert when you made your evening camp is soon a lake . . . And then comes the sand storm. No horse can travel against it. If en route you can but turn your wagon to one side to furnish as much of a wind break as possible, throw a blanket over your head and wait for its passing. It may be two hours and it may be ten.” Overall, though, joy outweighed the misery. And when he arrived at Old Oraibi, after a half-dozen previous visits, Curtis was greeted with smiles from familiar faces—and a major piece of good news. On an earlier trip he had been allowed to film the Snake Dance from a rooftop. Now Sikyaletstiwa agreed to let him participate in that most important, extended prayer for water. He could go with the priests to the fields to gather diamondback rattlesnakes, bring them to a kiva and tend them, and be a part of the culminating dance.

  There was some calculation on the Hopi side. It had been a summer of unrest, with missionaries stepping up pressure to end the ritual and send Hopi children to a Christian school. As it was, the Tewa and Hopi people who lived on the reservation felt overwhelmed—and certainly surrounded—by the much larger Navajo population. Enlisting Curtis, at the height of his influence, could help the cause of the traditionalists. During his visit in 1905, Curtis had heard that members of the tiny Havasupai band to the north were dying of hunger. He promptly sent word to Commissioner Leupp in Washington, and starvation was averted (though tribal members continued to die from measles).

  Curtis agreed to meet all requirements, and to perform his duties without balking. First came days of fasting, to purify himself. Then the priests stripped and painted their bodies in preparation for the snake hunt, which lasted four days. Those early hours in the field, Curtis faced a trial that would reveal the depth of his dedication. As the new priest, Curtis was told that he had a special task: to wrap the first captured snake around his neck. It was tradition, or so they told Curtis. The Indians picked up a big rattler and extended it to him. The snake hissed and bared its fangs, the scaly skin touching the sun-bronzed neck of Curtis. He remained motionless, steeling himself for the tightening around his throat, trying not to scare the rattler into biting him. After a few long minutes, the snake uncoiled and was removed from his neck. Curtis had passed his first test.

  What he knew already was that the actual nine-day ceremony wasn’t so much a dance, as it had been advertised by outfitters and the rail lines that brought tourists to witness the public part of the spectacle, but “a dramatized prayer,” in Curtis’s words. To the Hopi, snakes were messengers to the divine. The priests of the Snake Dance order were the facilitators. In the kiva, the curling and hissing rattlers were washed to make them clean for the Hopi prayer. For nine nights, Curtis slept within a few feet of the snakes, either in the kiva or on the rim of the dugout home. On the day of the big dance, a congregant smeared paint on his cheeks, his forehead, his neck, chest and back. He removed all his clothes and dressed in a simple cloth covering his genitals. Crowds massed along the edge of the village, tourists and natives, ten deep in places. The snakes were lifted from the kiva to a central place. The crowd moved in tighter. Priests began to dance, picking snakes as partners, singing prayers and incantations. Curtis, waiting in the wings, held back, hiding from view. At the last moment, he balked. He knew the audience was stocked with missionaries and government agents; he could tell by looking at them, taking notes for possible prosecution. He recognized Anglo faces. His presence, the great Shadow Catcher, the first white man ever allowed to participate as a priest in the Snake Dance order, would be widely disparaged in official circles and reported in the popular press. After six visits, over six years, studying and photographing every part of the ceremony, getting to know the religious leaders and then becoming a priest himself—at this culmination of his quest he worried that, should he take the final step, he might undermine the most significant event of the Hopi religion.

  “I was fortunate enough to be able to go through the whole snake ceremony,” he wrote his editor Hodge, “. . . in fact doing everything that a Snake man would do except take part in the Snake dance. The only reason I did not do this was because I feared newspaper publicity and missionary criticism.” He was also troubled by the earlier events of the summer. What had happened to Goshonné, the Apache medicine man, after he had spilled the secrets of the tribe’s creation myths, and the scare of the last day in Canyon de Chelly, had told Curtis much about the balancing act of his work. He had gone deep into the culture of a people that Americans had never understood, deep enough to realize—even at this moment of triumph—that there were places where he did not belong.

  Before the Storm—Apache, 1906. In the arid high country of Arizona Territory, Curtis spent many months trying to capture Apache moments. Told the Apache had no religion, he was determined to prove otherwise.

  8. The Artist and His Audience

  1907

  CURTIS WINCED AT the stabbing questions of a writer facing the most terrifying of prospects: a blank page. Where to begin? How to tell the story? What exactly was he trying to say? Had his sole job been the photographer assembling an epic of images,
it would have been much simpler. But words were something else. He’d been published in Scribner’s, yes, and a handful of other magazines, and had given enough lectures to be confident he could hold an audience rapt. With the first book, he had to reach for something sturdy and authoritative, and that realization brought on writer’s block. As Morgan had said, he was best suited to put down the words; he was the “photo-historian,” so called by the newspapers, a dual responsibility—too much, perhaps. He forced pen to paper now under the lengthening shadows of thick oaks in Arizona, late in a season that had taken him from the Apache homes in the White Mountains to the Jicarilla Apache communities in New Mexico, with numerous other stops in between.

  THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN

  Being a series of volumes picturing and describing

  the Indians of the United States and Alaska, written,

  illustrated and published by Edward S. Curtis.

  That was easy enough. He gave credit to Roosevelt, Hodge and J. P. Morgan on the title page. Myers, Phillips and Muhr were thanked inside. He noted that “the task” had its inception in 1898. But enough explaining and thanking; no one cared how the milk got to the porch. Once more—where to begin? So much to tell. So much to show. As a distraction, Curtis dashed off a letter to his patron, without mentioning his labor pains. “All goes well with the field work, and a year from now should see the first volumes completed and off the press.” Oh, to be on the other side of the creation, looking back. He added a statement of intent, just enough to give Morgan a flavor of what was to come. The work would surely be “scientific” (that word again) but “not dry,” as everything that came before it, by implication, had been. Was such a hybrid even possible? Above all, as he had explained to Morgan at 23 Wall Street, his ambition was to do something that might be worthy of display alongside the scribbled baubles in the banker’s manuscript collection. Those literary treasures had just been moved into Morgan’s new library, an interior space so stunning the London Times had called it “one of the wonders of the world” and compared him to Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici benefactor.

  Morgan had other things on his mind. He was preparing for a six-month trip to Europe, a leisurely pursuit of some of the very Florentine masterpieces commissioned by Il Magnifico himself. As he was set to go, the stock market tanked. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before. After hitting a high of 103 in the early part of 1906, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 20 percent, and a recession knocked millions of people out of work. A scheme by copper barons to control that market was collapsing, forcing other commodity prices down. Morgan’s riches had been made on superb timing: buy low in a panic, sell high in a bubble, look for efficiencies; why have two rail companies operating a line to Buffalo when a consolidated single one would do? Morgan had stakes in most of the troubled markets but, nearing his seventieth birthday, was inclined to take the long view. He sailed for Europe.

  Curtis started in again with the introduction for Volume I, his muse arriving at last from the outdoors. “At the moment, I am seated by a beautiful brook that bounds through the forests of Apache land. Numberless birds are singing their songs of life and love. Within my reach lies a tree, felled only last night by a beaver . . .” That felt right: the words, like the pictures, must spring from the earth itself. “Nature tells the story,” he continued, the light from his candles receding, wax falling to the tent floor. Though he would herewith record group histories, as one might explain Viking clans and their many battles, the goal of this narrative of small nations was to tell them from the point of view of the land and the Indian.

  “It is thus near to Nature that much of the life of the Indian still is; hence its story, rather than being replete with statistics of commercial conquest, is a record of the Indian’s relations with and his dependence on the phenomena of the universe—the trees and shrubs, the sun and stars, the lightning and rain—for these to him are animate creatures. Even more than that, they are deified . . . While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.”

  Snow forced the Curtis party indoors in the final days of 1906, a year when he had been away from home for nine months. In the last few weeks of their fieldwork, the team had gone to Montana and the Dakotas to hire translators, and then returned to the Southwest for a tour up the Colorado River by primitive steamship, starting in the Mojave Desert. That end-of-year sortie was an examination of small desert tribes that would appear in Volume II—Pima, Papago, Yuma and related bands, scattered and largely landless, but bound by life under a broiling sun. Some of the people looked as desiccated to Curtis as a field that had not seen rain for months.

  In Arizona at year’s end, Curtis rented a couple of boarding rooms and holed up with Myers and Phillips for a winter of writing and sorting pictures. Away from saloons and cities, restaurants and churches, sporting events and family dinner tables, the Curtis party would have few distractions. “Not even our family knew our whereabouts,” Curtis wrote to Morgan. The mail came a few times a week. Curtis cooked and went for walks. They labored over language and images, filling out and refining Volume I, drafting and sketching Volume II. Curtis was helped immensely by the economical prose that Myers had picked up as a newspaperman in the factories of early-century journalism, which allowed no room for writer’s block. Myers found the words when Curtis could not. And he respected a deadline. When something was ready to be released from the Arizona cloister, it was sent to Washington, where Frederick Webb Hodge edited and vetted. The western crew worked for nearly three months, usually seventeen hours a day, no time off, not even Sundays. After some debate between Curtis and Hodge over how many of the crimes against Indians would be detailed, if at all, Curtis stuck with his initial vow not to rehash the woeful history. Still, after seeing so much of Indian country in decline, he could not resist a dig or two.

  “Though the treatment accorded the Indians by those who lay claim to civilization and Christianity has in many cases been worse than criminal, a rehearsal of those wrongs does not properly find a place here,” he wrote in Volume I. He saved his loftiest passages, as in his magazine journalism, for native spirituality. “Ever since the days of Columbus the assertion has been made repeatedly that the Indian has no religion and no code of ethics, chiefly for the reason that in his primitive state he recognizes no supreme God. Yet the fact remains that no people have a more elaborate religious system than our aborigines, and none are more devout in their performance of the duties connected therewith. There is scarcely an act in the Indian’s life that does not involve some ceremonial performance or is not in itself a religious act.”

  Hodge loved the introduction, changing very little, but insisted on accuracy for things such as accent marks and pronunciation guides. His many queries on small details sent Myers shuffling through the field notes and audio recordings, and shooting questions to academics who were willing to help. Approval also came from President Roosevelt, editor without pay in the employ of Curtis. The president particularly liked the general theme, which Curtis brought home in the final words of the introduction—a justification for the manic pace of his life over the past nine years.

  “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rights possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time. It is this need that has inspired the present task.”

  In New York, starting in the spring of 1907, Curtis went hat in hand to solicit subscriptions from wealthy American institutions. He hated this drudgery—begging from the rich. There was the question of his background. Where had he gone to school? Who was his father? Are you sure Mr. Harriman will vouch for you? And just how involved is Mr. Morgan? In Manhattan, he was not
the Shadow Catcher cajoling snake handlers and looking for faces in a storm. He was a salesman, a huckster of a grand history but huckster nonetheless, expected eventually to sell a full five hundred subscriptions. To date, he had commitments for only a few dozen. He needed $3,000 for each twenty-volume set, exact publication dates to be determined later. That price, of course, was the low end. But if the culture brokers shared his sense of urgency, as some of them said they did, they did not extend it with their checkbooks. Time and again, the door was closed in the photographer’s face with the same response: he had the backing of J. P. Morgan, what more could he need? Let the world’s richest banker pay for everything, as he had promised, yes?

  It helped little to explain that Morgan’s money financed only the fieldwork. And even that, it was already clear after less a year, would not be enough. A single month in Arizona had cost Curtis more than $5,000. Worse, it was not a good time to persuade the rich to unburden themselves with philanthropic ventures. Indians, gad—interesting, to a point. Stocks fell steadily through the first months of the year, after a selloff in the previous quarter. Commodity markets continued to collapse. Brokerage houses, having made speculative bets on margin, closed down. Interest rates soared. The economy ground to a halt. It was, in the parlance of those episodes when capitalism got very sick, very quickly, a panic. The one in 1907 was called the Bankers’ Panic.

  “Things here in New York are strictly Hell,” Curtis wrote Professor Meany in Seattle, “and what the future is to be no one seems to want to guess. The book building, however, is moving along nicely.”

  Curtis was already obsessing over the subject of the next volume: the Sioux. Big parts of Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana had been shaped by the many bands of the defiant Sioux, bison hunters and warriors who gave nothing to the easy-sketch historians trying to romanticize them at century’s end. Curtis had started working with the Sioux in 1905—“they got into my brain and I cannot shake it off.” While on the northern plains, he had picked up a considerable amount of firsthand information about the final battle of George Armstrong Custer. What he heard from the Indians did not match the story that had made him a doomed hero among whites. The Sioux and the Crow—one tribe attacking Custer’s men, the other serving as scouts for him—who had survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 had valuable eyewitness accounts to impart. Nobody had done an exhaustive retracing from the Indian view.