Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  For Curtis, losing the studio was the lowest blow. His countless negatives and glass plates, the many prints he had labored over with Muhr—they were part of “the property.” What would Clara, still seething and capable of assaulting her own daughter, do with these treasures? Beth, apparently, was unwilling to take that chance. Rushing to act before the keys were turned over to her mother—and moving ahead with the approval of her father—Beth and several employees worked nonstop to print up dozens of Curt-tones of some of the more iconic images and shepherd them off for safekeeping. Then, trunkloads of glass negatives were taken across the street to the basement of the Cobb Building and destroyed. It is unclear why this was done—was it to prevent Clara from going out on her own with all the Curtis property she’d won in the divorce, as some family members have said?—but what is known is that hundreds of plates were smashed to pieces.

  The tired sun of Hollywood was not the ideal cast for a man who once waited days for a single instant when natural light held the world a certain way. But Curtis was now being paid by how quickly he produced a picture, and so better to move it along. Here was Tarzan in 1921, looking ridiculous in leopard-skin loincloth, fake vines in the foreground, blowing a flute. A flute! The job that kept Curtis going in 1921 found him shooting the actor Elmo Lincoln, who starred in a series of Tarzan movies at the height of the silent picture era. Lincoln had made a name for himself in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, two of the best-known works of D. W. Griffith, and he could be a pain.

  For Curtis, Los Angeles was now home. He opened a new office at 668 South Rampart Street, a few blocks from some of the major film studios. It was just Curtis and his daughter. Beth ran the business side. Curtis labored over portraits of character actors and cowboy stars, film directors and minor starlets. He needed a fresh start, and Hollywood, with a steady payroll for pictures, seemed like the best place. It meant something, still, to have “Curtis” written across the bottom of a photograph, with the familiar fishhook signature. The jobs came at an uneven pace and did nothing to stir Curtis’s blood. It was hackwork. He processed the pictures out of his home. One of the great ironies to beset his own film was that shortly after In the Land of the Head-Hunters was released, the commissioner of Indian affairs announced that the government would no longer allow filming of Indians in “exhibitions of their old-time customs and dances.” Hollywood went back to featuring Italians and Mexicans in pulpy westerns shot on back lots not far from where Curtis now lived.

  Curtis was a middle-aged, divorced man trapped by bad luck, he told a friend, without spare cash even for a train ride to Arizona. The piecemeal work paid the bills, and kept the “Home of Curtis Indians,” as it said on the stationery, a going concern. What that meant was that—someday—there might be enough money to spring him from Los Angeles. At first he did only movie stills, though he certainly knew his way around any device to record an image. Tarzan was a big client. Curtis tried to bring some dignity to the work. He posed the shirtless actor straddling a stream—the familiar water motif—each leg on a rock. The studio wanted the leopard skin, and the damn flute. Who was Tarzan calling? Would creatures of the African wild respond to a summons from a white guy with a delicate instrument? These were not questions for Curtis to answer. His job was to take the publicity shots and go on his way.

  In time, he found work from some of the biggest names in Hollywood, most prominently Cecil B. DeMille. For the great director, Curtis took photographs of The Ten Commandments in production, and also did some of the field research, such as it was. A beach in Santa Monica became the Arabian sands. Much later, DeMille gave Curtis acknowledgment as a second cameraman on the film, though he never got a screen credit. A few of the Hollywood pictures that remain reveal a dash of Edward Curtis—a high-drama chariot scene, blue-toned pictures that convey plenty of betrayal, lust and intrigue, and a handful of arty nudes.

  Curtis never thought of Hollywood as anything but a sad, single-business town full of hustlers. He recognized the type. Everyone had a screenplay, of course. Even Meany inquired about getting some of his stories onto the screen. Good God. Curtis responded in blunt terms.

  “The scenario schools and rewrite crooks keep leading people to think that there is a market for stories,” he told Meany. “I know good writers who have from a dozen to 50 good stories on the market and have not sold one in three years.”

  Meany was by then a beloved figure in the Pacific Northwest; a mountain in the Olympic range would be named for him, as would Meany Crest on Rainier. He’d found it difficult to maintain his friendship with Curtis after the photographer left Seattle in 1919, because Curtis did not hold up his end. He fell out of touch, a slight. He also succumbed to depression, a fog that made him feel helpless and humiliated. In correspondence, and in the eyes of many who had considered him an American master, Curtis was a dead man.

  When Meany heard in 1920 that Curtis had slipped into town, he dashed down to the Rainier Club, only to learn that Curtis had already left for the train. The professor ran the half mile to King Street station, but just missed him. Later, he heard that Curtis had suffered a complete breakdown, his depression leaving him unresponsive and unproductive through some of the Hollywood years. That would explain why he was afraid to see Meany, and would go years without writing him.

  “My good friend,” Meany wrote Curtis in 1921, “I certainly wish you more happiness than has been your portion of late.” For all the lapses and holes in their friendship, Meany kept working on the relationship, though Curtis continued to shun him. Sam Hill, the quirky railroad millionaire, suggested to Meany that Curtis could make a bit of money touring reservations with an Indian-loving Frenchman of his acquaintance, Marshal Joseph Joffre, an Allied commander during the Great War. Hill lived in Seattle and was an early Curtis backer. He was best known for erecting an enormous castle along the treeless, windswept hills in the eastern part of the Columbia River Gorge and then stuffing it with Rodin sculptures and live peacocks. Curtis felt the suggestion demeaning. What, was he now some tourist guide for entitled toffs?

  Hill’s idea prompted the first letter Curtis had sent to Meany in a long time. “I fear this is not possible,” he wrote in January of 1922. He was feeling low, empty and angry, and couldn’t let any of it go. “Mr. Hill, always having an ample bank account at his command, is scarcely in the position to realize the situation where one has to produce something today or not eat tomorrow.”

  Makah Whaler, 1915. On the far western edge of the continent, Curtis loved the inherent drama of fishing and whaling. The whaler is Wilson Parker, dressed in traditional bearskin, with the spear and floats used in the hunt.

  Soul mate: the towering Professor Edmond Meany shared nearly every moment of triumph and despair with his friend Edward Curtis. Here he poses with Chief Joseph and Joseph’s nephew Red Thunder in a picture taken by Curtis in his studio in 1903.

  15. Second Wind

  1922–1927

  THE CALIFORNIA OF THE 1920s was perhaps the most fertile place on earth to grow a life. In a state the size of Italy, with a climate often compared to a soft caress, lived barely three million people—and most of them in two urban clusters, around the splendid San Francisco Bay and in the semidesert strip of Mediterranean idyll in the south. The natural nursery of heavy winter rains and river-delivered black soil meant an abundance of earthly riches: cloud-busting redwoods in the north, billowy copses of wild oak in the foothills east of the bay, prickly pear cacti and spike-flowered yuccas in the south. It was all elbow room and opportunity in the sunshine, unless your family had lived there for centuries and centuries. For in the California of the 1920s it was easier to find fake Indians in Hollywood than real ones in the land of their ancestors. When the Spanish sent missionaries in the 1700s, Indians numbered about 300,000 in the state. They lived in extended clans, grouped into more than a hundred distinct tribes, none very big. They were sustained by acorns and game in the Napa Valley, salmon and berries around the Golden Gate, deer and roots
in the Central Valley. In manner and outlook, they were as varied as the terrain. By 1848, when the American flag replaced those of Spain, Russia, Mexico and the Bear Flag Republic, the Indian population was about 100,000. Over the next ten years, a tide of swift mortality wiped out 70,000 natives. What remained of the first residents of California scattered to isolated pockets of the state. The elimination—an indirect biological war—had been so systematic and complete that in 1911, newspapers around the world trumpeted a major discovery: an Indian named Ishi was found near the slopes of Mount Lassen. The last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, he was brought to the University of California at Berkeley for study and probing, a living exhibit. Ishi was short, tangle-haired and middle-aged, and spoke a language no one could understand. His name meant “man” in the Yana dialect, and he was heralded as the last “primitive” Indian in the state.

  For Edward Curtis, looking to revive a life work that had been largely dormant for much of the previous eight years, California was a challenge. Even the most knowledgeable anthropologist, aided by a network of native insiders, would be hard-pressed to find remnants of the old life. How to present a culture when only a few scraps existed? Myers had been working California since the team finished with the Kwakiutl in 1914, collecting field notes, conducting interviews, checking facts with scholars. Start in the north, he advised Curtis: go to the mountains, the tangle of vines and old-growth trees. The Indians of California were as hidden as the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

  Curtis packed a tent, a cot, a bedroll, clothes, a Coleman stove, pots and pans, several cameras, a recording device, reference books and food into a Chevrolet coupe and headed upstate from Los Angeles. He drove through the Central Valley, following the San Joaquin River and then the big artery of the Sacramento before veering northwest toward the volcano of Mount Shasta and the folds of mountain ranges in the Trinity and Klamath wilderness areas. Getting out of the city and back under an open sky did wonders for his mildewed spirit. And there was an added lift: in the tiny town of Williams, just outside Mendocino National Forest, an easygoing, conversational twenty-three-year-old woman stepped off a train from Seattle and fell into the arms of her father. Florence Curtis wanted to connect with her dad as an assistant in the field. Her hair was cut short for the summer, a bob. At fifty-four, Curtis had grayed considerably since “Flo” last saw him, and had lost most of his hair on top, which he covered with an ever-present cap. The Vandyke beard, his trademark since the 1890s, remained. He walked with a noticeable limp, and told Florence it was from an encounter with a whale while filming the Kwakiutl—the leviathan’s tail had whacked Curtis, severely limiting his mobility. This tale of the tail was just that; the whale, of course, had been purchased dead and towed to the film site. But why attribute a slowing of the great man to the boring grind of age when an adventure in Indian country would add to his legend? If Curtis had begun to embellish his life, Florence did not hold it against him. She found her father a delight—“brawny and brave,” she said later, but also “a gentle, sensitive man.”

  Clara was out of Edward’s life, except for missives from her lawyers complaining about tardy alimony payments. He was kept afloat emotionally by the two daughters who worshiped him and a son who wanted to move back west. Beth was twenty-seven and married now to a portrait photographer named Manford Magnuson—a likable addition to the Curtis family. She ran the studio in Los Angeles and spoke for her father on many an occasion, in letter form or on the phone.

  The studio and Hollywood work had finally generated some needed money to get Curtis out with the Indians. He’d been putting a few dollars aside in those gray years as well, from royalties of a little children’s book he’d published in 1915 and continued to sell, Indian Days of the Long Ago. All of this gave him just enough to buy a long furlough away from Hollywood. In Seattle, he was a man from another era, and a subject of dark rumors inside the Rainier Club, where some of his best pictures—magnificently finished and framed—now covered many walls. In Los Angeles he was a minor appendage to a star-making factory. But the closer he got to Indian country, the more Curtis felt like his old self—an aging zephyr, on the move again in search of American originals. With a measure of dignity restored, Curtis felt strong enough to renew a correspondence with an old friend.

  “I am certain you will be glad to know that I am in the field working with Indians,” he wrote Meany in the summer of 1922, the first letter in seven months. “I am out on a three or four month trip with the Indians of northern California . . . Florence is with me. Other than that, I am alone.”

  Curtis had emerged from his bleak hibernation earlier that year with a characteristic burst, rousing himself for a sizable achievement in producing Volume XII. This publication was devoted entirely to the Hopi, the second time he had given over all of one work to a single tribe. Jack Morgan paid for the printing, after being nagged by testy subscribers who had not seen anything new from the Shadow Catcher since 1916. The Hopi volume was brilliant, Curtis at the top of his form, the book stuffed with some of his best images collected over a twenty-year period. He had spent seven seasons with the tribe, more than any other, though his last trip, in 1919, was a disappointment. The grim wheels of modernity, which had rolled over the mesas of central Arizona ten years earlier, had left their tracks everywhere. As a result, book twelve was a history more than a contemporary snapshot. But what a story in graphic form. His pictures had that intimacy again, devoid of subject-and-photographer awkwardness. In shots of unwed girls of the Hopi Nation, with their hair tied in those squash blossom whorls that marked their virginity and looked like giant mouse ears, you can almost hear the giggling. In a picture titled Afternoon Chat, some of the women cover their mouths in amusement. A crowded still life, On the Housetop, is a village scene that explains many facets of Hopi living—the kiva entrance, the ladder to the upper rooms, a baking area where piki bread is prepared, an outdoor oven. And perched around the village like birds on a tree limb are women with black-and-white shawls, their hair wound as tight as a lollipop. Whether in close-ups, like the picture of a child awaiting the return of the snake dancers, or in one showing a Hopi man with straight bangs and early frown lines, or in the long shots that feature architecture and building styles, Curtis offered the most detailed representation of a single tribe ever committed to film.

  In the text, cowritten by Myers, it’s clear how much of a hold the tribe had on Curtis. “There is a subtle charm about the Hopi and their high-perched homes that has made the work particularly delightful . . . Numerically weak, poor in worldly goods, physically small, they possess true moral courage.” The setting was sublime. “The incredible blueness of the sky and brilliance of the stars take hold of the heart and call one back again and again.” He detailed an ancient life on eight pueblos carved into the tops of mesas. He told how they had been able to fight off Christianity for nearly four hundred years; only in recent times had a faction of the tribe succumbed to missionaries. He lamented that “a futile decree that Hopi must wear their hair short” and the “blundering interference in harmless religious and personal customs” had resulted in “a gradual abandonment of the old order.” In expressing such a sentiment, Curtis was speaking for himself as much as the Hopi. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded of this enchanted bit of high-desert ground, “There is a rather disheartening air of newness.”

  In California, the Curtis pair pressed the wobbly wheeled Chevy over the high passes around Mount Shasta and ducked into dark forests on the west slope, aiming for hamlets of aboriginal life along the rivers that fell away toward the coast. Most of the area was roadless, a remnant of continental America that had been largely untouched by the tide of humanity then filling other empty spaces on the map. While San Francisco County had a population of 500,000, a few hundred miles north, Trinity County numbered only 2,500 people in its two-million-acre expanse, and not a single incorporated city. Curtis named his car Nanny, for its goatlike prowess at clinging to precipitous vertical side
s and leading them onward, upward, downward.

  Florence was astonished at her father’s pace and his skill in the outdoors. He seemed to know every bird and fish, the name of every flower and fir and deciduous tree along the way. He sensed a coming storm by cloud formations and wind, and remained strangely calm when it looked as if they were lost. In the evening, he put up camp quickly, though it did not look like a hastily thrown-together resting spot. He insisted that the tent always be placed in the finest setting, for the view. In the morning, when Florence awoke, he had coffee brewing and cheese omelets on the Coleman stove. He tried to procure fresh fish at the close of a day. For those dinners, Curtis expertly filleted the salmon and grilled it, skin side against the fire, as the Indians did, and as Curtis had done on the Columbia. He liked his vegetables barely cooked, to keep the flavor intact, and he always brought enough ingredients to toss a salad with Roquefort dressing, the recipe that had dazzled the Roosevelt family. Dessert was poached pears or other fresh fruit, slightly caramelized. All of this was camping fare, done without a kitchen. For sleeping, he weaved spruce boughs into a cushiony bed, “a work of art, and so comfortable,” as Florence remembered.

  Watching him assemble the set pieces of his life work, Florence was in awe of the one-man North American Indian project. She had seen him at work in Canyon de Chelly among the Navajo, dashing between thunderstorms, experimenting with exposures by closing and opening the flap of a tent that served as a portable studio, cutting deals in native shorthand. At the time, she was a girl of seven and could not appreciate his skills in the rugged world he inhabited outside Seattle. As an adult, Florence was amazed at how they would arrive in a strange village and, by day’s close, have people posing for him. One rainy afternoon looked like it would end with nothing to show. But Curtis found a teenage girl living along the Smith River. He offered her a silver dollar if she would dress up in a cloak of her family’s making and pose on a bluff against a metallic sky. The Tolowa woman was photographed in a bejeweled deerskin kilt, her face in profile. Curtis used a 6½-by-8½-inch camera for this work, the lens expanding out like an accordion, and durable for the bouncing ride of Nanny.