Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  Another time, they camped not far from Ukiah, where Indians labored in the bean fields. The day had been hot, near 100 degrees in Flo’s telling. Curtis and daughter were just settling down with the dip of the sun when an Indian girl ran into camp, breathless. She explained that her grandmother had been picking beans in the heat and now seemed dizzy, sick. Curtis must come at once. He fired up the coupe and followed the girl’s directions to the Indian settlement. Inside a small lean-to he found a woman who appeared very ill. Florence urged her father to get a doctor.

  “That’s for them to decide.”

  Curtis did in fact summon a doctor, but not one with a degree. A medicine man who had been hired by Curtis as a translator arrived with herbal remedies and went to work on the old woman. Curtis and Flo returned to their own camp. The next day, the girl came back with news: her grandmother was much better. “Our medicine man knew what to do.” What surprised Florence was that her father had enough faith in the Indians to heal themselves without outside help.

  They crossed the coastal mountains, driving east to west, then west to east, in a dizzying zigzag, six times that summer. Nanny held up, but for one hiccup. On a mountain road carved into the red soil of the Klamath range, Curtis veered off to the side, the way narrowing without warning. His car was forced to the edge, where there was no more level ground to hold them. The coupe slipped, slouching toward a deep gorge. Curtis bit on the cigarette in his mouth and gunned the engine; it was just enough to move the car a few more feet, avoiding a free fall. But still, in the tug of gravity, the car leaned, fell on its side and started to tumble. The chasm yawned several hundred feet down. By some miracle the car came to rest on a hardy oak anchored to the mountainside. The tree saved them from certain death, they both recalled, though Curtis credited his driving skill.

  “Once in a lifetime one uses good judgment in what seems to be the last moment of existence,” he wrote in a long and passionate letter to Meany. “This was one of the times.” After the car came to a stop against the tree, Curtis looked below. “Sitting in the seat, I could have tossed my still burning cigarette two hundred feet down to the first ledge of the gorge.”

  Shortly thereafter, he traded wheels for paddles. They arrived on the shore of the swift Klamath River, a gnarly old stream that drained a land where pre-glacial-age forests of northern California mingled with the newer evergreen terrain of the Pacific Northwest. Hiring two Indian guides, Curtis and daughter moved upriver, negotiating the riffles and tugs of the Klamath, great fun for Florence. Once, she caught sight of her father’s face in a moment of uncluttered joy—an image that stayed with her for years.

  The trip paid off with some of his most memorable work from California: Indians spearing and catching trout in weirs, harvesting water lilies in late summer light, making huts out of tule reeds. At times, Florence and her old man found a pool of water that was utterly still, providing Curtis the mirror he so loved for reflecting a subject on a rock perch. This kind of framing presented a people inseparable from an unspoiled world—just as Curtis had outlined in 1905. If, back at the government food clinic in town, an image of short-haired men in overalls lining up for powdered milk was more representative of modern Indian life, Curtis wasn’t interested. Would an Irishman in a hamlet on the Dingle Peninsula prefer to be shown trailing sheep or getting a care package from America? The question answered itself. Curtis was a documentarian only of a certain kind of life.

  In southern Oregon, they chugged up to the rim of Crater Lake, the ancient, lopped-off volcano that was filled with centuries of Cascade runoff, the surface holding a big sky at midday. As John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had discovered when they camped on the crater’s edge, one of the deepest lakes in the world made visitors stop in their tracks. Curtis also liked the big, sweet-scented ponderosa pines with their jigsaw puzzle bark. He photographed a Klamath chief looking out at the great bowl of the lake. It was good stuff, this late-summer work, enough to make for some dramatic highlights in Volumes XIII and XIV. The first book would cover the Hupa, the Yurok, the Karok, the Wiyot, the Tolawa, the Tututni, the Shasta, the Achomawi and the Klamath. The next would include the Kato, the Wailaki, the Yuki, the Pomo, the Wintun, the Maidu, the Miwok and the Yokut. He delighted in the details he’d discovered: how the scarlet scalp of a pileated woodpecker was used as the showpiece atop the heads of Hupa dancers, or the explanation for why the Yurok people would not talk to dogs—they were afraid the dogs would talk back.

  But as he gathered oral histories, building on the work of Myers and studies that had been written earlier, Curtis could not contain his disgust at the epic of torture these natives had endured—starved, sickened, raped, betrayed, run down, humiliated.

  “While practically all Indians suffered seriously at the hands of the settlers and the government, the Indians of this state suffered beyond comparison,” he wrote Meany from California. “The principal outdoor sport of the settlers during the 50s and 60s seemingly was the killing of Indians. There is nothing else in the history of the United States which approaches the inhuman and brutal treatment of the California tribes. Men desiring women merely went to the village or camp, killed the men and took such women as they desired . . . Camps were raided for men to serve as laborers. Such Indian workers were worse than slaves. The food furnished them being so poor and scanty that they died of hunger.” He finished with an account of treaties broken after gold was found on Indian land. “Thus the Indians became a people without even camping places which they could call their own. No story can ever be written which can overstate the inhuman treatment accorded the California tribes.”

  This castigation of his countrymen was not just for Meany’s eyes. A very similar vent was opened in Volume XIII. As he emerged from his blue period, Curtis became ever more outspoken. Though they had fought in the Great War, and before that made up a unit of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Indians still were not citizens in the country some had died for. Tribal holdings continued to shrink, from 138 million acres in Indian hands in 1890 to barely 50 million in the 1920s. Assimilation was the unquestioned policy. Reservations were to be sliced into pieces and sold. Tribal links were considered anachronistic, the customs and rituals barbaric. Indians would blend and fade into the carpet of twentieth-century America until they were no longer identifiable as a people apart, until they looked and talked and worked like everyone else.

  In 1923, Curtis helped to found the Indian Welfare League, taking up a political cause—with artists, museum curators and lawyers, based mostly in southern California—for one of the few times in his life. The group was formed to find work and legal services for the tribes, and got heavily involved in the issue of Indian citizenship. But as a one-sided crusader, Curtis often strayed from the script, neither weak-hearted liberal nor hard-nosed realist. His campaign was a mix of tough love for Indians and scorn for Washington experts. In a speech in Santa Fe, he said Indians must stop feeling sorry for themselves. “Self-pity is absolutely fatal,” he proclaimed. “It is worse than dope.”

  At one extreme were government censors and know-nothings, choking the life from native culture and trying to wash the Indian identity from the people. In Curtis’s view, these agents of authority should occupy a special place in hell, alongside missionaries. At the other end, Curtis had no tolerance for people who believed Indians could do anything they wanted to so long as it was considered “traditional.” He was particularly upset that men in some of New Mexico’s tribes had sex with young girls because it was somehow tied up in ritual. Curtis knew that people thought he cared only for “the old Indian, with no interest whatsoever in the economic welfare of the Indian, his education, his future,” as he said in Santa Fe. In fact, his work to immortalize the Indian past informed his campaign for the Indian future. That initiative paid off in 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizen Act, making native people full stakeholders in the republic. The tribes with treaties, signed by presidents and passed by Congress, would remain sovereign—nations within a na
tion, in the words that came to define the relationship.

  The same year saw publication of the two latest editions of The North American Indian, the volumes from work in northern California, Oregon and Nevada. In recording, translating and passing along the words in numerous tribal tongues, Curtis noted that more languages were spoken on the West Coast of the United States than in all of Europe. In recounting the near genocide of the first nations of the Golden State, Curtis was blunt: “The conditions are still so acute that, after spending many months among these scattered groups of Indians, the author finds it difficult even to mention the subject with calmness.” Reviews of the new books were practically nonexistent. Americans, in the frothy fever of the Jazz Age, had little interest in Indian pictures. And Curtis? Is he still with us? There was no mention of him in the papers, even after the towering achievement of the Hopi volume. Meany tried to cheer his friend: Curtis was six books from the finish line, and should never give up so long as he could draw a breath.

  “About the only thing my friends can do is hold a little belief in me,” Curtis replied. “I am working hard and trying to justify such faith as my friends may have. The problems are many, however the real work moves on.”

  The real work then went into high gear, almost matching the pace of Curtis’s early years. He and Myers spent the fall of 1924 in the Land of Enchantment, among the pueblos of the Rio Grande, all the way up to Taos. As the Spanish had interbred with many of these tribes, by conquest and settlement, some of the faces looked vaguely European, though Curtis found plenty of fascinating material for his camera. He took issue with some of the earlier conclusions about these people published by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, the anthropologist who spent years in New Mexico under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian. And she took issue with him. “Mr. E. S. Curtis declared to me that to reach the inner life of the Indian one must have his pocket book overflowing until the money runs out in a stream upon the ground,” she once said, in reference to the days when Curtis was flush with Morgan money. Were he a credentialed scientist, she said, this would have bothered her greatly. But because he was an artist, she eventually gave him her full support. “Mr. Curtis’s work is beautiful as it is.” Of course, Curtis always wanted to be known for much more than beauty. Writing Hodge, he and Myers were almost breathless in reporting that, once again, they would be correcting the record; much of what was in textbooks about Acoma, Taos and other communities of New Mexico was simply wrong. This work would fill volumes XVI and XVII.

  The next year, 1925, Curtis made a rare business trip to New York. Where once he had crisscrossed the country routinely, he now did so only for the most pressing concerns. Jack Morgan had agreed to see The North American Indian through to the end. The House of Morgan was now more than a quarter million dollars into their Indian photographer. Still, its portion covered barely a fourth of Curtis’s expenses. This final investment would come with a steep price: Morgan raised the issue of transferring the Curtis copyright to him. More than a decade earlier, Curtis had lost business control over the project itself when it was turned over to Morgan’s bankers. He had also given up all rights to his movie in 1924, part of a scramble for desperation cash. But he still held the copyright to the plates and negatives of The North American Indian. With his latest investment in Curtis, Morgan expected something in return. It was not a charity they were running. Negotiations would continue.

  Curtis headed for the northern plains in the summer of 1925, meeting Myers in Montana. From there, they crossed the Canadian border into Alberta, with its lacerating winds and oceans of grass. The tribes were spread over an enormous expanse of tableland at the foot of the Rockies. Reaching them, getting their stories and taking their pictures, was akin to going into an area the size of Germany and looking for a handful of old ethnic-Polish families.

  Curtis and Myers traveled to Calgary and then spread out in search of Sarsi and Cree. It helped tremendously that Curtis had so much prior knowledge from his days with Bird Grinnell among the Blackfeet and Piegan. The Alberta natives depended on caribou, as the Plains Indians to the south relied on buffalo. They were nomadic, following food sources, living most of the year in tipis. The pictures that Curtis took are stark, stripped of artifice. He framed wind-sanded faces and silhouetted men on the bare backs of ponies. He shot Cree picking blueberries and Chipewyan pitching tents in aspen groves. As usual, Myers worked the written narrative. “We were lucky to find a very good source of information for the Cree and Chipewyan, and pumped it dry,” Myers wrote Hodge. This work filled Volume XVIII.

  The following year, 1926, would be given over to field research for the final book on Indians in the contiguous United States—the tricky task of finding intact indigenous communities in the state of Oklahoma. Then the work would close out, in Volume XX, with people of the far north. Oklahoma was a dumping ground for tribes from all over the country, with reservation boundaries that were as erasable as letters on a crossword puzzle. To Curtis, it was the place where native ways went to die. The name itself is a combination of two Choctaw words—okla, which means “people,” and humma, the word for “red.” Nearly a fourth of all Indians in the United States lived there, as Curtis noted. But very few had been in Oklahoma for long, or by choice. What to do, for example, with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that had been marched from the South and settled in Oklahoma?

  Curtis would concentrate on the once fearful Comanche (known as the Lords of the Plains), the Wichita, the Southern Cheyenne and the Oto. He told Myers to be in Oklahoma on May 1, the date of an intertribal gathering. But Myers, a year shy of his fiftieth birthday, had started to drag. He was married, with a business proposition awaiting him in California, and had promised his wife a much-delayed trip to Europe. For days on end he agonized before he penned a painful letter to his boss and partner: “It is an unpleasant thing to have to write you that I shall not be able to do any field work this summer. An opportunity has presented itself to make a lot of money in the next two or three years—a real estate transaction. It is one of the kind that rarely occur, and I am getting too old to pass it up in hope that another will be at hand when the Indian work is finished.”

  Myers, like Hodge in New York, had been working for minimal compensation, laboring through the 1920s to help Curtis finish The North American Indian. But at least Hodge had a steady paycheck from his job at the museum. Myers had nothing to fall back on. The country had gone on an economic tear in the giddy years after the war, the stock market doubling, tripling, commodity prices doing the same thing, real estate that had warranted barely a glance now shingled in gold. Middle-aged, with nothing to show for giving his best years to Ed Curtis, Myers felt he had to leap at a chance to make a deal or two that would set him up for his old age. He had moved to San Francisco with his wife, and using her money, he had bought a building. The plan was to renovate it and then sell it for a large profit. But the project would be time-consuming, leaving little room for anything else. He had no choice but to quit The North American Indian. “As you probably know, the desire to finish the job is what has kept me at it these last few years on a salary that doesn’t amount to much in these times,” he concluded, “and only a very remarkable chance could have induced me to drop the plowhandle.”

  Having lost Muhr, his photo-finisher, Morgan, his patron, and Upshaw, his translator; having had Phillips, his field stenographer, and Schwinke, his cameraman, go off to other callings, Curtis counted on Myers as a brother in The Cause. Myers was his second self, his ghost in the writing, his chief ethnologist, journalist, editor and wordsmith combined, the only person alive who knew the work as well as Curtis, who bled the project. What’s more, he and Curtis truly got along. After almost twenty years together, “we never had a word of discord,” Curtis wrote. The North American Indian, with its exhaustive accounts of languages, customs and histories that had never been fully recorded, might never have existed without Myers. Not only was his work ethic extraordinary, matching Curtis in long hours, but his temper
ament was suited to the thankless task. He rarely complained. But it was all over now.

  “Like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky” was how Curtis described the news to Hodge.

  He paid tribute to his partner in the introduction to Volume XVIII, the last book to which Myers contributed. “In the field research covering many years, including that of which the present volume is the result, I have had the valued assistance of Mr. W. E. Myers, and it is my misfortune that he has been compelled to withdraw from the work, owing to other demands, after so long a period of harmonious relations and with the single purpose of making these volumes worthy of the subject and of their patrons,” Curtis wrote. “His service during that time has been able, faithful, and self-sacrificing, often in the face of adverse conditions, hardship, and discouragement. It is with deep regret to both of us that he has found it impossible to continue the collaboration to the end.” Myers wept when he read the dedication.

  The new kid was just out of the University of Pennsylvania, a native of Vermont. Did he know anything about the West? About Indians? About ethnology? Not much, as it turned out, but Stewart Eastwood had taken some anthropology classes and had come highly recommended by an authority on “Eastern Woodland Indians,” as his résumé said. Eastern Woodland Indians? Who the hell were they?