Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  Curtis had tried to lure Hodge out of the office to take up the final fieldwork with him, knowing he liked to flee the city, particularly for trips to the Southwest. But Hodge had a full schedule at the museum, so he vetted the Ivy League kid and sent him out to Oklahoma to meet the Shadow Catcher. It was a rough go. Eastwood joined Curtis at a large intertribal gathering in the flat light of Oklahoma. They spent weeks working sources, looking for faces to shoot, stories to tell. It was depressing. “The program is tentative,” Eastwood reported back to Hodge, “we are up in the air since so many problems have arisen . . . The five civilized tribes are so much civilized, so white, that they will be impossible while the wealthy Osage are not only becoming civilized but wealth gives them a haughtiness difficult to overcome.” It was a problem, this business of civilized tribes and tribes grown rich from oil discoveries on tribal land. Curtis noted that “idle wealth” was like a disease among the Osage; the men were chauffeured around in new cars, while the women—in an ironic twist—employed poor whites as their housekeepers.

  The Wichita were another kind of problem. Mormon and Baptist missionaries had been all over them, and as a result, many tribal customs were now banned as pagan rituals. Their practice could mean a sentence to hell. “Couldn’t even take a picture of one of their grass houses,” Eastwood complained. (Curtis eventually managed to shoot that very image, titled Grass House—Wichita, for Volume XIX.) Tribe after tribe, it was the same story—no story. The past had not only been banished but wiped away, no trace of it in this new land. The urgency of his work over nearly a third of a century, always in a hurry to stay one step ahead of “civilization,” was never more justified than in Oklahoma. There, Curtis saw his worst fear; it was why he’d lamented, time and again, that with each passing month “some old patriarch dies and with him goes a store of knowledge and there is nothing to take its place.”

  No tribe in the country had fallen so far as the Comanche. Once, as masters of an enormous swath of flatland, they had forced Texans to retreat behind settlement lines and Mexicans to run at the sight of them. Indians from other tribes would slit their own throats before allowing themselves to be taken prisoner by a Comanche. There were no better buffalo hunters, nor more efficient warriors, than this tribe. They reveled in scalping and torture of enemies, particularly fellow Indians without battle skills. Their raids for wives and horses were legendary, going after the Apache, the helpless Five Civilized Tribes and assorted natives up and down the Rio Grande and north into Kansas and Colorado. All of it was carried out with an exuberant “blood lust,” as Curtis wrote. The sight of the Comanche now, forced into stoop labor, raising chickens on a reservation in Caddo County, Oklahoma, was pathetic to Curtis. “The old wrinkled men,” he wrote, “sit about and tell of the days of their ancestors when life was real and full of action.” The best he could do was to concentrate on portraits. Only in the faces could Curtis find some hint of the authentic. He did not care if they appeared before his camera in starched shirt and tie; what fear the Comanche still struck in the hearts of others would have to emanate from a glare that carried a sense of menace from their grandparents.

  The text was a struggle from start to finish. Hodge judged it an inferior work and asked for a major rewrite. He complained to Eastwood about his spelling, accuracy, sentence structure and the paucity of new information. It was a mess. They clearly needed Myers’s hand. And Myers himself was sorry that the work had suffered so much from his departure, feeling author’s remorse. “I am distressed by your report on vol. 19,” he wrote Hodge, “it really causes me regret that I yielded to the lure of Mammon.” By early 1927, after hammering away at Eastwood, Curtis felt the kid was improving, though he was not holding up well to the withering critiques from Hodge. Eastwood threatened to quit.

  “You’re a good editor but a bum diplomat,” Curtis wrote Hodge. “It has taken a lot of quick figuring and hard talking to keep the boy in line. To have him drop out at this last moment would wreck the ship.” Hodge insisted they keep their standards high this close to the end. “There is no need of being thin-skinned in a work of this kind. The manuscript is either right or wrong, and if wrong should be righted.” The writers went back to their notes, but it was hard to find water when the well was dry. As they closed out the editing, Curtis conceded that Volume XIX probably would not stand among the rest. Time had robbed him of the chance to find the pulsing heart of Indian life in the state with more Indians than any other.

  “You say the Comanche material is inadequate,” he wrote Hodge in a testy exchange. “I grant you that it does not make a strong showing, but one cannot make something from nothing . . . The only material we could find was countless, meaningless, fragmentary obscene stories of the camp fire type.”

  There remained one chance for redemption: to finish on a high note in the far north. Alaska had held a special place in Curtis’s heart ever since his sea journey there with the Harriman expedition of 1899. He was thirty-one then, still on the boyish side of manhood. The gimpy-legged graybeard of 1927 who made plans for the final field trip of The North American Indian was broke, divorced, a year shy of his sixtieth birthday. He had a lifelong nicotine addiction and the smoker’s hack to go with it, as well as assorted grumpy complaints about his bad fortune at this stage of life. And yet in one respect he moved as he always did: confident in motion itself as the animating virtue of his existence. Beth would finance the trip with money from the studio and from her husband, Manford Magnuson, whose own portrait photography business was doing well. The latest home of the Curtis studio was the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, which gave it a glamorous address for the stationery and was a prime spot for tourist traffic. Visitors from the East or from Europe needed to go no further than the lobby of their downtown hotel to purchase a Curtis Indian, the kind of picture that would generate stories back home and become an heirloom in time.

  The new plan was to sail from Seattle to Nome, a fogbound seaport in Alaska Territory, ice-free only a few months of the year, within easy distance of the Arctic Circle. From Nome they would branch out to the Bering Sea, to islands and cliffs, in search of Eskimo people, all the way to the Siberian shore. They could work sixteen-hour days in the midnight sun, Curtis reasoned, and stretch the season out until the first snows of September. “Good fortune being with us we may, by working under great pressure, manage to finish the task in one season,” Curtis wrote. The college kid, Eastwood, signed on for a second go-round despite his difficult rookie outing in Oklahoma. The joy for Curtis was the first assistant, his daughter Beth. For much of her life she had dreamed of spending time in the wild with her father. Florence had gotten to experience him in action in California. Now it was Beth’s turn. When Myers heard of the final launch of The North American Indian, he was sick with regret, killing time in San Francisco, his real estate deal yet to come together.

  “Curtis writes me that he is leaving for Alaska,” Myers told Hodge. “I wish I were going.”

  Walpi Maidens—Hopi, 1906. The young women wore their hair in squash blossom whorls.

  On a Housetop—Hopi, 1906. Curtis returned to the Hopi Nation more than half a dozen times, until his presence was barely felt. These women lived at the summit of the stone village of Walpi, in Arizona.

  A Smoky Day at the Sugar Bowl—Hupa, 1923. In northern California, after many years in which his grand project was at a standstill, Curtis was revived by a trip with his daughter Florence back into Indian country.

  16. The Longest Days

  1927

  THE STEAMER VICTORIA left Seattle on June 2, 1927, bound for Nome and ports in between, a journey of 2,350 miles by sea, a bit shorter than a trip by train from Puget Sound to New York. The rail travel cross-country could be made in four days. The passage to northern Alaska was supposed to take ten. A late-spring drizzle misted over Elliott Bay as Curtis and his daughter posed on deck. He was in suit and tie, with a thick woolen overcoat, cigarette in hand. Beth wore a flapper’s cap, a fur-collared jacket and a c
ocky smile that bore her father’s DNA. “It truly seemed as though I was going to the other end of the world as the boat pulled out from the wharf and I was finally on my way for the much longed for trip with Dad.” Both father and daughter kept diaries. For Curtis, it was the only time he wrote a day-by-day account of his activity, and he even gave it a title: “A Rambling Log of the Field Season of the Summer of 1927.”

  Curtis had last plied these northern waters twenty-eight years earlier. That ship was stocked with liquor, cigars and a canteen of costly preserved foods, as the rail baron E. H. Harriman had spared no expense for the passengers, which included some of the best-known and most learned men in the United States. By contrast, the Victoria carried working stiffs—fishermen, bound for seasonal jobs with the salmon fleet, and argonauts, still chasing a strike in goldfields that had been played out years earlier. The trip took almost two weeks. They glided by British Columbia, past the Queen Charlotte Islands where some of Head-Hunters had been filmed, into the Russian-flavored port of Sitka for provisions, north to Skagway to drop off the miners, onward to Anchorage, and from there west, out beyond the long finger of the Alaska Peninsula, a sharp right turn north, through the Bering Sea, then northeast at last to the flat, treeless, dispiriting shell of Nome, coated in the mustard light of a June night.

  Nome was a dump. What had been in 1910 the largest city in Alaska Territory, with a population of nearly fifteen thousand, was now a few hundred slope-shouldered souls in a hand-me-down town. Once the easy gold that could be sifted from beach sand was gone, the prospectors disappeared as well, littering the coastal plain with their garbage. Nome was left with a boardwalk of uneven planks, shuttered saloons, scraps of long-abandoned tents and heaps of rusted tin cans on the shore. Curtis looked for a quick ticket out of town, to reach the outer islands where Eskimos lived. Frustrated that he could find no one to take him to native villages, Curtis purchased a boat of his own, the Jewel Guard, forty feet long, twelve at the beam, with sails and an engine for windless days. It came with a skipper, a Swede called Harry the Fish. They could trust him, Harry the Fish informed the Curtis team, because he’d sworn off alcohol, women and tobacco. The sea was his only remaining vice.

  On June 28, they sailed for Nunivak Island, a distance of about three hundred miles—Curtis, Beth, Eastwood and Harry the Fish. Curtis felt unbound, restored by an open calendar in an ocean of possibility. “Anxious, yet thrilled with the joy of riding the high seas in a tiny craft,” he wrote. The Bering was deceptively calm at first, though studded with ice blocks. A vigil had to be kept at all hours to avoid a collision with floating hazards. The sea turned churlish one day in afternoon winds, kicking up swells the size of beach cliffs. “The waves were ten times as great as our boat & we were shipping much water,” Beth wrote. They soon found safe harbor, went ashore and slept on the beach, snoozing until late afternoon. Pulling up anchor, they navigated by compass reading south through Norton Sound. More ice, the chunks bigger and menacing, appeared. Winds kicked up again, throwing water over the deck. Temperatures were barely above freezing. Isn’t this grand? “Ice thick, headway slow, fog closed down so cannot see two boat lengths,” Curtis wrote. Fearing a collision, Harry the Fish killed the engine and dropped sails. They would drift with the ice. While the others tried to sleep below deck, Curtis kept watch.

  “Gloomy night, wind howls thru rigging and there is constant sound of grinding, shifting ice,” he wrote, fingers numb, slipping with the churn of the sea. “Not so good a start. From the wind and movement of the ice I know it is a bad storm but being in the ice pack there is no sea.” By day five, they were still a considerable distance from Nunivak Island, and the pace was a crawl—barely a mile an hour. They anchored near a sand spit, hoping the storm would be short-lived. After another day, they headed back to sea, only to face even bigger swells. Climbing one of the waves, the ship nearly capsized, a scare that forced a hard decision: back to the sand spit to sit it out. But visibility was gone; the customary Alaskan weather made Norton Sound a dreamscape of murk. “We are headed back, running like a scared jackrabbit,” Beth wrote. Near midnight, they hit a sand shoal and came to a dead halt. “Solidly aground, parked on the floor of the Bering Sea,” Curtis noted dryly. They were about twenty miles from shore.

  As the wind and water sneered all around them, they could do nothing but wait, the boat helpless. “One minute our craft was a joyous, free bird skimming off the sea, the next a crippled thing being pounded across the bar.” Curtis did the only thing he could: he waded a few feet from the grounding, set up his tripod and took a picture of the Jewel Guard in the grip of Alaskan sand. At least when they found their bodies, a picture would tell a story.

  They waited out a cycle of the tide, an eternity, counting on the rising water to lift them. The inbound slosh moved the boat, but not completely off the spit. They sat for another cycle, and this one brought just enough of the sea to liberate the Jewel Guard. “Oh, boy!” Curtis wrote. “What a relief to feel her floating.” That night, they killed an eider duck and cooked it with dumplings, followed by a desert of tapioca pudding and apples.

  On July 10, the vessel came within sight of Nunivak Island; it had taken them as many days to go 300 miles as it had to sail 2,300 miles from Seattle to Nome. Spirits lifted as soon as they came into the harbor: the island was free of the clutter of modern life. Joy! People rushed up to greet them in well-crafted kayaks made of tight animal skins, chattering away, pointing and laughing. Curtis was euphoric. “The natives here are perhaps the most primitive on the North American Continent,” he exulted.

  Beth was happy to see her father giddy and locked into his work. They had heard, back in Seattle, of a resident of Nunivak Island named Paul Ivanoff, the son of a Russian father and an Inupiat mother. A pleasant companion, he was hired as a guide. He knew everyone on the island, and ran a reindeer herd that was marshaled around the mosquito-infested tundra like a crowd of cattle. Curtis feasted on the images. And more than any other time in the field, his pictures showed . . . smiles! Native children, native women, native elders—they grinned wind-shined jack-o’-lantern faces back at the Shadow Catcher, exuding a deep beauty. Their nose rings and chin piercings were dazzling little orbs of jewelry, sparkling in the sunlight. This was a place like no other he had seen through three decades of portrait foraging. “Think of it,” he wrote. “At last, and for the first time in all my thirty years work with the natives, I have found a place where no missionary has worked.”

  The most memorable image he called Woman and Child, a baby clutching the backside of his serene-looking mother, both clad from head to toe in the soft loft of duck-skin parkas; it was just two faces in a joined bundle of avian hide. The light at Nunivak was not the best—too bright to bring out the deep topography of an Inupiat face—but good weather made for long days of exploring, story-gathering and picture-taking. Eastwood, working with Ivanoff, conducted the language and historical tasks, while Curtis floated around in a kayak taking shots of Eskimos at work and play in the halo of July. Carvers of ivory and hunters of whale, they were active people for a man who loved a purposefully peripatetic life. Curtis could not get over his good fortune.

  “Should any misguided missionary start for this island,” he wrote, “I trust the sea will do its duty.”

  They left Nunivak on July 26, hearts heavy with regret. A day later, at the village of Hooper Bay on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, they found a scene of squalor and grim-faced toil among three hundred or so Yup’ik Eskimos. What struck the Curtis party was the filth. The people smelled as bad as they looked, reeking of rotten seal meat, smoked fish and sea detritus. “The Hooper Bay natives have the reputation of being the filthiest human beings on the Globe,” Curtis wrote. “I have not seen all the world’s dirty natives but I can say that no human can carry more filth than those here.” Beth had the same reaction, though without her father’s lifetime of perspective. “It is positively the most disgusting place I have ever seen & the women & children have never bat
hed or combed their hair.” Eastwood was appalled too, though he tried to give his observation some gravitas: “Living as they do in mud and dampness, it is estimated that 75% have tuberculosis.” The Curtis crew stayed offshore, choosing to sleep on their boat rather than spend a night among the unkempt denizens of Hooper Bay. One evening, desperate to clean the stench of the village from his body, young Eastwood stripped naked and dove into ice-choked waters. They anchored at Hooper Bay just long enough for Curtis to get the picture he was looking for—a beluga whale hunt—and then beat a quick retreat.

  Back in Nome in early August, the long days disappearing in gulps of daylight, it was time for Beth to say goodbye. She had allotted most of the summer for the grand northern odyssey with her dad, but had to return to the studio and her husband in southern California. Curtis, Harry the Fish and Eastwood would press on, north to the Arctic Circle. Beth left town for Fairbanks on a clattering, clumsy cargo plane, expressing fear in the last words of her log that “I would never see him again.”

  A few days out of Nome, drifting toward the Bering Strait, Curtis was drawn to a village clinging to the rocky skin of King Island. It was a terraced, seasonal town for walrus-hunting, perched above a narrow migratory passage. Curtis counted twenty-seven houses, each built from driftwood, standing on tall, rickety stilts. Should a resident step outside for a midnight pee, he might well tumble down a cliff into the sea, a hundred feet beneath the huddle of shacks. A huff of hard wind could blow all of it down. The Curtis crew shouted for a voice; nothing echoed in return. Not only was this village free of missionaries, it was devoid of natives as well. Everyone was away, Curtis surmised, and would take up residence only during the peak of the walrus migration.