by Timothy Egan
Indeed, he was free of his life work in every respect. The Morgan Library had received an inquiry about Curtis in 1932, from a collector in Sweden. “I see that the extremely valuable and significant work of ‘The North American Indian’ by Edward S. Curtis has come to its close with the 20th volume,” the collector wrote. But there was no offer forthcoming—just curiosity. “I fear its high price will never make it possible for any library in Sweden to purchase it.” In fact, the House of Morgan was looking to dump its Curtis collection. Throughout the Depression, they ceased any attempt to sell or market the work, which remained in archival hiding. And so, when an offer from a Boston rare-book dealer named Charles E. Lauriat Jr. came along, the library liquidated most of its Curtis holdings. Morgan gave Lauriat the right to sell nineteen complete sets of The North American Indian, in addition to thousands of prints, gravures, the priceless glass-plate negatives and the copyright—all for a mere $1,000.
It was a huge haul of material from the book that had been compared to the King James Bible. Each set contained more than 2,200 original pictures, almost 4,000 pages of text, including transcriptions of hundreds of songs and dozens of languages, plus additional portfolios of oversized photogravures printed on plates. Lauriat also acquired the original copper photogravure plates used to make the images of the book. The library records showed that over the years, only 222 complete sets were bound and given to paid subscribers, mostly institutions, and another 50 were printed but never completely packaged. The Morgan Library held on to copy number 1. A notice in its archives recorded the divorce between patron and benefactor: “On May 15, 1935, the directors of The North American Indian, acting as trustees, assigned all assets to Charles E. Lauriat Company for the purpose of sale.” Lauriat thereafter sold the 19 sets, and eventually assembled 50 or so others into bound volumes, and he made fresh prints as well. A few of the glass-plate negatives kept by the Morgan Library were overlooked in the sale and handover, and later disposed of as junk.
On the movie set of The Plainsman, in eastern Montana, Curtis was home again in the land where he had deciphered the Custer story, where he and the Crow translator Alexander Upshaw had talked well past midnight about the ways of the Apsaroke. DeMille was filming a story of craven Indians and heroic white men, just a few miles east of the Little Bighorn battlefield and within a hawk’s glide of the home of the Sioux. If Cecil B. DeMille had ever asked him, Curtis could tell the story of a people who rode bareback at full sprint, more graceful and powerful than any of the hired hands on this set. He knew the original names of many a mesa, mountain and watering hole. He could pronounce the words, and tell how The People came from a hole in the ground long ago, animated by The Creator. But he was not in the Badlands to convey Indian realism or Indian mythology. He was there in service to Paramount Pictures and a fiction built around Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. The lead Indian roles were played by Paul Harvey (not the radio announcer) and Victor Marconi, with Anthony Quinn in a bit part as a surly native. Curtis’s job was in the background, taking stills of the stars in action, the Italians in Indian paint, the hero Custer who rides in with the cavalry to save the day. A number of Sioux were recruited for a few shots; they were ordered to whoop, holler, grunt and fall down dead.
The movie was a rare crumb of good fortune for Curtis in his old age. He returned to southern California, back to occasional pokes in the Sierra for gold and to steady research for a new book on the oldest metal lure of all. But over time, the body would no longer do the work. He could not will muscles in his bad leg to move, nor could he clamber over rocks without risking a fall. His children told him to give it up. The occasional letter found him, with a query not unlike that of the librarian: are you still alive? A curious Mrs. Gardner from Seattle wrote in 1937, wondering what had become of The North American Indian. “The negatives and copyrights as a whole passed completely from my hands,” Curtis informed her matter-of-factly, adding that he could not use his own work without getting into legal trouble. “I devoted thirty-three years to gathering text material and pictures for the twenty volumes. I did this as a contribution; without salary, direct or indirect financial returns. When I was through with the last volume, I did not possess enough money to buy a ham sandwich; yet the books will remain the outstanding story of the Indian.” At the end of the letter he mentioned that the work was valued overseas—why, in a museum in Great Britain, patrons are not even allowed to touch the pages! “A gloved assistant does it for them,” he noted.
Curtis had reached that stage in life when the social rituals are not weddings or baptisms, but funerals and burials. His younger brother Asahel died in 1941, of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-six. Over the course of his career, he probably took more pictures than did Edward. He shot everything: the first skyscraper in Seattle, the Smith Tower, which for much of the twentieth century was the tallest building in the West; the earth-moving projects that left spires of the original city around as engineers tried to make a flat metropolis; Indians on downtown streets and athletes on the field; dams, schools, office buildings, ships, trains and roads. His camera had a utilitarian eye, without any weakness for sentimentality. He was best known for his outdoor work, as a climber and a conservationist. With Meany—a friend to both Curtis brothers—he guided the Mountaineers through decades of growth, and was the first person to scale many of the iconic peaks in the Northwest, including Mount Shuksan in the North Cascades. He carried his feud with Edward to the end: the brothers had not spoken to each other in over forty years. His ashes were placed at the site of the newly named Asahel Curtis Memorial Grove in Snoqualmie National Forest, east of Seattle. When a son, Asahel Curtis Jr., was asked in 1981 about the brothers’ estrangement, he said only that it was “ridiculous.” And when the same question was put to Jim Graybill in 2012, the sole surviving grandchild of Edward hinted at a shameful story, saying, “I just can’t discuss it.”
Curtis moved to a farm near Whittier, California, owned by Beth and her husband. There, he talked to the chickens, grew avocados and oranges. He was bored and restless, in need of an adventure. He spent hours preparing large meals at family gatherings, where he took issue with anyone who did not see the greatness in his cuisine. Shortly before Harriet Leitch contacted him, Curtis moved back to the Los Angeles.
Near the end of 1948, Curtis started sending memories to the Seattle librarian. While rummaging through a trunk at his daughter’s home, he’d come upon a seventy-four-page memoir he’d written decades before and never published. He spent all afternoon with this account of his adventures—twenty thousand words. “I began reading it at once and found it so interesting that I did not put it down till the final word was reached.” He sent a copy to Leitch, and he also shipped her the major reviews of The North American Indian, from all over the world. These clippings, he wrote, should give her a sense of “the considerable importance of the work.” He said he’d received more than two hundred notices, all favorable but one—a critic who disagreed with Curtis’s revisionist account of the Nez Perce War. (Later historians sided with Curtis.) And he urged Leitch to spend some time with a single book from the series, to pick one at random: “Look at but one volume to see what a task it was to collect such a vast number of words of assorted dialects.” Along the West Coast alone, “we recorded more root languages than exist on the rest of the globe. In several cases we collected the vocabulary from the last living man knowing the words of a language. To me, that is a dramatic statement.”
Leitch was impressed. And she was “thrilled,” she said, to read the autobiographical sketch. She knew his reputation as a photographer, but the anthropological work, the salvage job of languages from the scrap heap of time—that was a revelation. Countless words that had bounced around pockets of the Great Plains or dwelled in hamlets along the Pacific shore lived—still—because Curtis had taken his “magic box,” the cylindrical recorder, along with him when he went to Indian country. Also, he had preserved more than ten tho
usand songs. And yet, for all the stories, myths, tribal narratives and languages Curtis had saved for the ages, it was curious, the librarian suggested, that the photographer had never told his own story. Why no memoir beyond the sketch he’d sent her? Surely his dashing and perilous life, the unstoppable young man in his Abercrombie and Fitch, the self-educated scholar who made significant breakthroughs in ethnology and anthropology among overlooked nations, his proximity to J. P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt and E. H. Harriman and Gifford Pinchot, his campfire tales from Chief Joseph and Geronimo and the last of the mighty Sioux warriors—surely there was a great, sweeping story to be told.
Curtis had indeed started to record his personal history, sitting for days with his children so that they might have something for posterity. But now he lacked the oomph; the project had been shelved. “Among the foremost why nots, I am not in physical or financial condition to attempt so large an undertaking,” he wrote. Plus, he’d heard a familiar refrain from the gatekeepers of American letters in New York: “A publisher told me there is but a limited market for books dealing with Indian subjects.”
He spent Christmas with Beth—a “delightful” holiday. With the dawn of the new year of 1949, Curtis started to regain some energy. The stories spilled out of him, in letters mailed up the coast to Harriet Leitch. He recalled his father, the sickly preacher and Civil War private, who died when Curtis was fourteen, leaving him to become “the main support of our family.” He told about his accidental avocation, how he took up photography only after a severe back injury prevented him from making a living as a brickmaker or in the lumberyards. He described for Leitch his first Indian picture, Angeline—“I paid the Princess a dollar for each picture I made. This seemed to please her greatly.” He gloried in long accounts of Mount Rainier climbs. He talked about his work habits. “It’s safe to say that in the last fifty years I have averaged sixteen hours a day, seven days a week,” he wrote. “Following the Indian form of naming men, I would be termed, The Man Who Never Took Time To Play.”
Their correspondence carried through another death, in April of 1949—William Myers, the writing talent behind The North American Indian. He had married a second time and moved to Petaluma, north of San Francisco, where he managed a small motel. He was seventy-five at life’s end, six years younger than Curtis. A routine obituary in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat did not bring up Edward Curtis or the fact that Myers had spent the majority of his adult life doing first-rate field anthropology and writing about it for the most detailed study ever done of native people of North America. He was described as a motel manager, retired and childless.
Through the summer and into the fall, Curtis worked away at the book he was building, tentatively titled The Lure of Gold. The walls of his tiny apartment were plastered with notes in his unreadable scratch. “I’m busy with The Lure of Gold,” he wrote Leitch in October, brushing off a fresh round of questions from her about his Indian work. By the spring of 1950, Curtis was almost manic with energy, again crediting his Oregon tea. “My health is improving, and now I look forward to celebrating my 99th birthday.” He parried back dozens of answers: on the reburial of Chief Joseph, on the good work of Professor Meany, and how together they discovered the true story of the Nez Perce, a pattern that followed with the Custer revision. How did he do it? “I didn’t get my information from the white man.”
Near the end of 1950, Curtis turned cranky. If it wasn’t “that damn television” blaring in a neighbor’s apartment, it was his arthritis, which on many days prevented him from holding a pen, let alone set it to paper. On such occasions, he said his “pen died a sudden death.” A few days before Christmas in that year, Belle da Costa Greene passed away in New York City, at the age of sixty-six. Her sway over the Morgan Library had lasted forty-three years, until her retirement in 1948. She never married, and took many of her secrets with her to the grave: she had burned her personal papers shortly before her death.
Curtis limped into 1951, the late-stage burst of energy having dissipated. “I am still housebound,” he wrote, “living the life of a hermit.” He wished for simple things—a stroll to the store to buy his own food, a taste of fresh strawberries, an afternoon on a park bench. “It’s Hell when you can’t go to the market and get what you want.” The apartment was suffocating him. He started calling himself Old Man Curtis, and his handwriting became illegible. In July of 1951, he was forced by finances to move to an even smaller apartment, at 8550 Burton Way, in Beverly Hills. He called it “the most discouraging place I have ever tried to live in.” Through that year, Curtis deteriorated further, though he responded to Harriet Leitch’s prodding in brilliant flashes here and there, with some of his sharpest recollections. He told stories of the Harriman expedition to Alaska in 1899 and of meeting J. P. Morgan for the first time. Teddy Roosevelt was fondly recalled—manly, loyal, robust, a mind as kinetic as that of Curtis himself. Leitch got an account of the Sun Dance with the Piegan and the Snake Dance with the Hopi. On February 16, his eighty-third birthday, Curtis posed for a formal portrait. He still had the Vandyke beard and wore his hat at an angle—no doddering old fool, this man.
Finally, the pace of memory-collecting slowed to a crawl and the words refused to come. Curtis complained about his “scrambled life,” a blur of disconnected images and places, all at the frenzied behest of The Cause. At night, in his dreams, he revisited the Hopi and Apache, the Sky City of Acoma, the Grand Canyon cellar of the Havasupai and the sublime isolation of Nunivak Island. Had he really been to these places? While asleep, he would construct “whole paragraphs in Indian words,” he recalled. These images came at random, as with any dream; it was his only real escape from the prison on Burton Way. He was desperate for a new home. “I have to get away from the smog.” As it became more difficult to summon his past, he apologized.
“This is a bum letter,” he wrote Leitch on July 3, 1951. “I will try to do better in the future.”
“I am nearly blind,” he wrote on August 4. Now, even the carrots had failed him. It was the last letter from an epic gatherer of words and pictures. He had written Leitch twenty-three times over nearly four years of correspondence.
On October 19, 1952, Curtis died of a heart attack. He was eighty-four. It was a national curse, it seemed once again, to take as a life task the challenge of trying to capture in illustrated form a significant part of the American story. The Indian painter George Catlin had died broke and forgotten. Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer who gave up his prosperous portrait business to become a pioneer of photojournalism, spent his last days in a dingy rooming house, alone and penniless. Curtis took his final breath in a home not much larger than the tent he used to set up on the floor of Canyon de Chelly.
E. S. CURTIS, INDIAN-LIFE HISTORIAN, DIES
The Seattle Times, which had shared his glory days as if they were the paper’s own, dismissed Curtis with a six-paragraph obituary that ran on page 33. As brief as it was, the notice in his hometown paper contained a number of inaccuracies, including a claim that Curtis was “Seattle’s first commercial photographer” and that he had gone on the Harriman expedition a full seven years before he ever met Harriman. The New York Times had drafted a lengthy life story when it appeared that Curtis was lost at sea off the Queen Charlotte Islands back in 1914. When he actually died, the paper ran an obituary of seventy-six words, and never directly mentioned The North American Indian. He was called an Indian authority who also did some photography. The obituary said nothing of the languages he recorded and preserved, the biographies he wrote of Indians still alive, the groundbreaking work he did in cinema. Some years later, the Times arranged with the collector Christopher Cardozo to sell “limited edition” lithographs of Curtis pictures, including some of the most iconic—At the Old Well of Acoma, An Oasis in the Badlands, Chief Joseph—and thus began a long, lucrative business offering the Indian pictures of the Shadow Catcher to connoisseurs around the globe.
Collectors were always asking if there was anyt
hing still to surface from the Curtis estate. No, Beth insisted: her father had left this world as he’d entered it, without a single possession to his name. That is, with one exception, unknown to outsiders, perhaps even to the House of Morgan, and certainly to the creditors who had chased him from one century to the next. Curtis had held on to a single set of The North American Indian, the twenty volumes taking up five feet of shelf space in the tiny apartment on Burton Way. Though he was alone at death, and friendless, not a single person in those books was a stranger to him.
The Shadow Catcher in winter, 1948. Curtis, at age eighty, was living out his remaining years in southern California. He dreamed of launching another project, struggled to write a memoir and spent many days talking to chickens and tending avocado trees.
Epilogue: Revival
Twenty years after Curtis died, a rumor spread through the circle of art-photography collectors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that somebody in Boston was sitting on an extraordinary treasure for bibliophiles. Karl Kernberger, a photographer with eclectic taste and a love of the Southwest, traveled east to have a look. Downstairs in the venerable Lauriat’s bookstore he picked his way through an enormous cache of the Indian work of Edward S. Curtis. The owner, Charles E. Lauriat Jr., had survived the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, an act of war that killed 1,198 people. His ongoing passion was for rare books, and he had no better find than the Curtis material he had bought for $1,000 from the Morgan Library during the Depression. Lauriat was an enthusiastic seller of this work, reassembling volumes into complete sets and retailing individual pictures, but his death in 1937 put an end to widespread dissemination. The images, the many bound books and loose plates, gathered dust until Kernberger’s arrival in the early 1970s. At the same time, mainstream America was embracing Indians as never before. Some of the enthusiasm was trendy and silly, but much of the reappraisal amounted to a fresh, more nuanced and humane narrative of the first people. The times had caught up with Curtis.