Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  But the Curtis of 1896 was no crusader. Not for him was the growing movement of missionaries and government policymakers to bring Indians into society, to get them into tight-fitting shoes, suit jackets with watch fobs, with proper haircuts, to Christianize them and force them to tend a farm, just like any yeoman American. Indians and their treaty rights, political autonomy and property disputes—all of that was somebody else’s fight. Politics. Injustice. Blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Curtis wanted pictures. The exchange between photographer and subject was purely a business proposition.

  He gave Angeline a dollar for her time, equal to a week’s worth of drudge work. What emerged from the many takes and the alchemy of developing chemicals was a face that could knock a door down with its slit-eyed stare. A tuft of silver hair peeks out from under Angeline’s scarf. The lines of her face are so deep, so prominent, they look like scars from a knife fight, as if someone had carved her visage from a pumpkin. Her mouth is downturned. Curtis allowed light to fall on her cheekbones and nose, enough to contrast with the sad, dark eyes, looking away at another time. Beneath her chin, where the scarf is tied in a knot, is another bit of hair. The shawl is wrapped completely around her shoulders, held together by a safety pin. That simple pin stands out as a diamond brooch might on a society matron. In the bottom corner of the photo is the knob end of Angeline’s cane. To look at the face and not see humanity is to lack humanity.

  The portrait of the princess was magnificent, and Curtis knew it, for everyone who saw it was impressed. But the picture was not what he’d had in mind when he first spied Angeline against Puget Sound. Over the following weeks Curtis returned to Shantytown. He saw Angeline in the mudflat, stooped and dark-cloaked, shovel in hand—the clam digger in her element. This was more like what he had seen in a flash that day on the shore. The sitting portrait was fine, but he was drawn to something more natural. Angeline had to fit her background, and that could never be the studio on Second Avenue. Nor was he interested in the image of the shrew, the hag, the crone. He gave her money to continue her grubbing and prying, as she had for decades. From these everyday scenes came the inspiration for two pictures. One he called The Clam Digger, the other was The Mussel Gatherer. No frowning, vanquished Indians here. No starving, bedraggled aborigines. No warriors. They were neither threats nor objects of pity. The subsistence life was front and center, an ageless figure digging for food in front of a tranquil bay, with a distant island and benign clouds in the background, no sign of a city at all. No face was visible either—just the hunched-over silhouette. Through his camera, Curtis gave the backbreaking work, which he never considered anything but lowly, a noble patina.

  From Angeline, Curtis learned about other Duwamish and Suquamish people who lived at the edges of the city, upriver, hidden from view. They saw the Point Elliott Treaty as a betrayal and had never signed on to it. Curtis waited along the riverbanks for them to return from picking hops in the fields, their dugouts loaded down, baskets on the shore. When they saw his camera the Indians would shy away, or force an expression.

  “No, no. Please. Just as you were.”

  From other Indians he learned about the reservation to the north, the Tulalip, where he was told he could see native people living the old way. He went to that little patch of the Indian realm, became acquainted with the tribal policeman and his wife, and spent hours watching the unremarkable rituals of daily life. At home in Seattle, the paying work was backing up: so many engagement pictures to be taken, ingénues to immortalize, businessmen to satisfy. He would get to all of it, but what stirred him most was the Big Outside—mountains, brooding forests, a saltwater inlet untouched by machines, and these nearly spectral people who seemed to belong to the land.

  Curtis paid the Indians on the Tulalip reservation, just as he had paid Angeline, buying access. But again, he stressed to his subjects that all he wanted was to observe them going about their day, gathering shellfish, weaving baskets from reeds. He wasn’t there to tell them how to do anything. Just the opposite.

  “I will work with you,” he said. “Not at you.”

  These pictures had elements of a seventeenth-century Dutch master framing the common class—Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, or even his Girl with the Pearl Earring. Curtis did not consider himself to be doing a historian’s work or that of a journalist or ethnologist. Still, it was important to get it down, and get it right. “The people in the main were sedentary, inhabiting well-made wooden houses,” he wrote of his new acquaintances, trying to correct a false impression of Indian mobility in every part of the West. And if people in Seattle thought native home-building was nothing more than a variant of the primitive shack of Princess Angeline, Curtis knew better; he had seen the glories. They didn’t live in leaky animal-skin tipis or under a roof of bug-ridden brush. “The triumph of their architecture,” he wrote, included a communal lodge that was “520 feet long, 60 feet wide, 15 feet high, supported by 74 split timbers” and built by Angeline’s people just a half century earlier without modern tools. “Agriculture was unknown” to the Coast Salish, he explained, not because Indians were too stupid to till the ground, but because “the ease with which food could be had from the sea left no incentive for development of agricultural life.” As a witness, young Curtis sensed the value of a diminishing world; it occurred to him in a stark epiphany that if he could capture these closing hours, he would have something of lasting value.

  Princes Angeline died in her cabin on May 31, 1896.

  ANGELINE IS NO MORE

  AGED INDIAN PRINCESS

  PASSES INTO SPIRIT LAND

  So blared the page-one headline of the leading morning paper, the Post-Intelligencer, accompanied by a sketch drawn from the Curtis studio portrait. City dignitaries hailed Chief Seattle’s daughter without reserve. “Princess Angeline was the best known and most picturesque Indian character of the Pacific Coast, or possibly in the United States,” said one prominent Seattleite. She was easily the most beloved of “the dusky daughters of the soil,” said another. For her funeral, the church ladies solicited money to build a casket in the form of a dugout canoe, which was prominently displayed at a mass in Our Lady of Good Help Church. She was buried under a big slab of rough-hewn granite at Lake View Cemetery. On the stone was chiseled: “Angeline, Daughter of Sealth, May 31, 1896.” Her cane was passed on to a civic grandee. In death, she gave the mythic poem of her life its last lines:

  There she lies, the Indian Queen

  Wrinkled, wise old Angeline.

  At the far southern edge of the city, near Lake Washington, a street was named for the princess. Her passing was news across the United States, detailed in a lengthy wire-service article. “She is almost certainly the last of the Duwamish Tribe,” the story concluded. And with that, the new inhabitants of this part of the Far West closed the book on a people whose presence had gone back to at least the time of the Roman Empire—most everyone, that is, but young Edward Curtis. For him, Angeline was the start of the largest, most comprehensive and ambitious photographic odyssey in American history. The second step would be upward, into the clouds.

  Princess Angeline, the last surviving child of Chief Seattle. Curtis took this photo in his studio in 1896, shortly before Angeline’s death, at a time when it was illegal for Indians to live in the city named for her father. He paid her a dollar for the sitting.

  2. Encounter on a Volcano

  1898

  TEN THOUSAND VERTICAL feet above the confines of his studio in Seattle, Curtis positioned himself now on Mount Rainier at the magic hour of a midsummer day—a time when glaciers that had been blue would blush for a few minutes. He set up his camera on a platform overlooking two downward-thrusting fjords of ice, wrinkled with crevasses eighty feet deep or more. He was shooting in black and white with his 14-by-17, but even glass plates without the ability to hold color could mirror something that few eyes had seen, there in the alpenglow of the volcano.

  For two years, Curtis had stalked Rainier in all its moods, catchi
ng the savagery of its storms, the exuberance of its wildflower burst, the listlessness of dead-zone fog that wrapped the mountain in spooky silence. In order to get close enough to understand Rainier, Curtis had to become a mountaineer. And in those two years of exploration, the sickly cripple of seven years earlier had become an accomplished climber. Curtis would find his way over ice and above the clouds, would crawl over crumbling lava rock and slow-tread along shaky snow bridges, making his own path. Intimacy—as with Princess Angeline—was what he sought with this subject.

  The natives in canoes and the big mountain sixty miles southeast of Seattle struck him as the most authentic parts of a region rapidly remaking itself. In the city, forests and hills were leveled, rivers were pinched, and boulders that had been left from the last glacial epoch were dynamited. Ports were dredged ever deeper and fields gouged open for canals—all in a great hurry to form a new metropolis. In defiance of the setting, the people of Seattle intended to bring the city’s bedrock hills down to something closer to the streets of their hometowns of Cleveland and Chicago. Giant hoses sluiced away the tops of Denny and Jackson hills, the mud running downslope to fill in the tideland near Angeline’s old shack.

  The younger Curtis, Asahel, was drawn to the urban creation, and spent his free time shooting industrial pictures, buildings rising, scrub brush turned to broad avenues. He was trying to establish a name outside the studio where he had worked for his brother since 1895. The boys shared a belief that their entrée into the larger world would be through a camera. While Asahel shot the mess of a city’s dawning, Ed Curtis was pulled to the bigger palette that started at Seattle’s edge. And if getting close to Rainier meant he had to warm himself in steam vents at the summit to keep from freezing, or duck into a snow cave that might smother him in a seismic shrug, he was game for it. The studio restrained him, even more so after he shed his partner in 1897 and went out on his own as “Edward S. Curtis, Photographer and Photoengraver.” In the city, he was the maestro with a trademark fishhook signature and a calendar full of appointments. In the high country, he was Curtis the climber, going places no photographer had gone.

  In the fading light now he looked down across the Nisqually Glacier and saw what appeared to be a small party on this summer’s eve. The clouds swooshed in on an ocean-borne current. Camp Muir was often a reliable bench above the evening fog. But with a strong westerly wind, the clouds could be pushed upward, obscuring the white wilderness. A few minutes was all it took for what had been an uninterrupted view in all directions to disappear, visibility reduced to nothing. Curtis lost sight of the climbers below, though their voices remained.

  “Hellooooooooo,” came a cry through a purgatory of gray. Curtis bellowed back. He sealed his camera and tucked it in his knapsack. Using his six-foot-long alpenstock, with a metallic pick at one end, he stabilized himself as he took small, quick steps downward toward the human sound.

  “Over here!”

  After some back and forth, silhouettes appeared in the soup, accompanied by much chattering and staccato grumbling. They were a half-dozen men, adrift and confounded on one of Rainier’s most treacherous glaciers, the Nisqually, an ice field nearly five miles long.

  “We’re lost.” The climbers were middle-aged and well outfitted, and looked to be fit and robust for their age. They were shivering, mist collected on their mustaches, clothes soaked. Curtis knew that dusk could be disorienting and deadly at this altitude. Down below, the flower meadows were known as Wonderland, and a campsite was called Paradise. Up high, names were as hard as the eternal snow: Cadaver Gap and Disappointment Cleaver. Rainier was the most heavily glaciated peak in the then United States—thirty-five square miles of permanent snowfields and ice. One step was all it took for someone to fall into a slit of the Nisqually, the body never to be retrieved, part of the mountain’s buried memories.

  In Curtis, the lost men had stumbled upon a climber known as much for his ascents on the high, unknown terra of the Pacific Northwest as for his leadership. They could not have been luckier.

  “Follow me.”

  He guided them slowly upward, making sure they stayed close together and took small steps, to his refuge at Camp Muir. He had hauled firewood over the previous days, and built a rock shelter where he could stoke a blaze and get out of the wind. He got the campfire going, and while sipping hot drinks the climbers revealed something about themselves. They were from the East, from New York and Washington, D.C. Men on a mission: studying the mountain for science, part of a campaign to give Rainier formal protection, which would happen the following year when it became the nation’s fifth national park. Yes, of course Curtis recognized their names, at least some of them. He had rescued two of the most famous people in America.

  The year before, Curtis had made national news—but not with his camera. The Mazamas, one of the best organized of the climbing clubs sprouting in postfrontier America, had ventured north from their home in Portland, Oregon, in the third week of July to attempt a record: most people to summit Mount Rainier. The traveling group of two hundred included women, in keeping with the progressive bent of the club, and several scientists. Though the mountain had first been scaled twenty-eight years earlier, it remained somewhat of a mystery. How active was the volcano? How thick were the glaciers? What forms of life thrived in the year-round snow? Even the exact height was in dispute, a question the Mazamas hoped to resolve. Among their members was Professor Edgar McClure, a University of Oregon chemist who brought along a mercurial barometer he planned to deploy on the summit as a way to settle the question of Rainier’s precise elevation. “Never before has there been such an excursion,” the Portland Oregonian reported, and quoted a leader thusly as he informed those they met along the way: “We were the pick and flower of Portland; our boys were all fleet of foot and strong of limb and our girls were all young and handsome.”

  The climbers arrived at Longmire, a base in the old-growth forest with hot springs for bathing. Then it was upward and onward, by foot to a meadow at Paradise camp. There, the climbers met a self-confident woman and her husband, an engaging, hyperkinetic man loaded down with camera equipment: “A certain Mr. E .S. Curtis of Seattle,” the Mazama journal noted. Clara, the mother of two young children, had no plans to aim for the summit, but she loved tramping around the high country with her husband. Curtis knew the mountain like his living room. He warned the climbers just before nightfall: should they awaken to a sound—“a deep, hoarse roar”—it would be an avalanche, off in the distance. Enjoy it, he said.

  The expedition was a massive undertaking, involving four tons of gear, two beef steers, seven milk cows, assorted beasts of burden and a brass band. That first night in Paradise, Curtis was summoned to help with an emergency: a man from California, “not accustomed to the dangerous vagaries of mountain storms in the Northwest,” in the Mazamas’ official account, had gone missing. Curtis set off in the darkness without hesitation, his wife unfazed. “Never shall I forget the heroic example that Mrs. Curtis gave us of womanly courage when she bade her hushed goodbye as he started out into the fog, the gale, and the dangerous darkness of the mountain the first night in camp,” wrote Dr. Weldon Young, the team’s doctor. They found the frightened, shivering Californian on snow two miles from camp. This rescue, and Curtis’s expertise on the mountain, so impressed the Mazamas that they asked him to lead their expedition. Curtis agreed. He also welcomed all female climbers who wanted to make a go for the top, and named one young woman from Portland, Ella McBride, as a coleader. McBride was a schoolteacher, with great stamina and athleticism that Curtis admired. Per a Mazama request, Curtis gave in to one custom of the club: the ladies were required to wear bloomers.

  After a prayer, up into the clouds they went in single file, accompanied by a slow-trudging, often slipping group of musicians carrying heavy instruments. Just before dusk, when they reached the snow camp named for the naturalist John Muir, the party was ordered by Curtis to cook up soup and stew, then bed down before nightfall
. The brass band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all went to sleep. They rose a few hours later, just after midnight, stomping their calked boots on compressed ice, a fat moon overhead, blankets wrapped around their upper bodies. Frozen lips pressed against frigid mouthpieces as the band tried to give their Mazama partners a tuneful sendoff. The first hour was all doubts and cold hands, Curtis encouraging the climbers to stay positive: it would get better after sunrise. They had so many questions: What should they eat? Very little. Their stomachs would be turbulent from the altitude. How slippery would the ice be? Hard, until midday. Are there many crevasses? Numerous ones, some hidden by snow bridges, deep and dangerous. Prod first with the alpenstock before taking a step.

  The push to the summit was a steady march past monoliths of rotten rock and aged ice. Sunrise came with a burst of rose-colored light and a view of the long blue wall of the Cascade range just to the east. As the day went on, the sun softened the snow, making it difficult to walk. The altitude made several climbers sick; they dug into the snow to wait out the climb. By 3:30 in the afternoon, what was left of the main party crested the crater and walked past steam vents to the summit. The volcano was alive, they realized, by the strong smell of sulfur and the hissing from the openings at the highest point of the Pacific Northwest. The Mazamas obtained their record, putting fifty-nine people on the summit. At 4:30, Professor McClure set up his mercurial barometer and took several measurements. Later, his figures were computed to an altitude of 14,528 feet, which would make Rainier the tallest peak in the contiguous United States. The altitude was off, as it turned out—too high by 117 feet.