by Timothy Egan
Curtis did not allow the party to stay long on top. He knew the snow that had been mush on the way up would quickly harden when the sun left it, and also that the way down was the most dangerous part of any climb. The exhausted party followed Curtis. Just after dusk, two climbers lost their footing and slid, falling quickly toward a ledge. They caught themselves before tumbling over a cliff. Curtis went after the frightened, scuffed men and led them back to the main group. Just before 10 p.m., all of the climbers collapsed at Camp Muir.
In the confident afterglow of their success, several Mazamas, including McClure, decided to go all the way to Paradise, a drop of five thousand feet, instead of spending the night at Camp Muir. Midway through that final descent, McClure hopped up on a rock to take in a moonlit view; he knew instantly he had made a mistake. “Don’t come down here,” he shouted. It was too late for him. He slipped, and was gone in a whoosh. The other climbers said they barely heard a thing. McClure fell hundreds of feet, bouncing over sharp rocks. Much later, when the Mazamas found his body, it was bloody, broken and perforated with deep wounds from sharp stones.
The Oregon professor’s demise was the first recorded death on Mount Rainier, and it was news across the country. The mountain had become a gentleman’s Everest for a certain kind of American adventurer. In the consensus view of the fatality, as later detailed in Harper’s Weekly, Curtis was not held accountable. He was praised as a brave soul who had not only led a historic climb of men and women to the top, but rescued two people on the way down. “Mr. Curtis proved the right man in the right place,” one account noted. “A better selection could not have been made.” After the climb, the Mazamas made Curtis an honorary member, joining John Muir and a few other notables. And they became appreciative fans of his outdoor photography, which Curtis advertised in a small brochure, “Scenic Washington.” (Sample offering: “A panoramic view of Rainier, framed, ready for hanging—$25.”) Within a year, the club boasted, “We now have the finest collection of Rainier views in existence.”
Back at Camp Muir, Curtis tried to explain the quirks of the volcano to the men from the East he had rescued. The mountain has its own weather system, he said. In the summer, the radiant glow of the sun off the snow is so intense it burns the skin even inside the nostrils. In the winter, up to ninety feet of snow can fall in a single season. At dusk, the pyramidal shadow of the peak stretches to the crest of the Cascades. At the top of Rainier, well below the surface, is a lake—melted water from the heat that pushes up the nearly three-mile-long throat of the mountain. And the Indians, who had called the peak Takhoma, never climbed it beyond the snowfields above the timberline. Only a fool or a Boston Man would try such a thing.
The climber most fascinated by Indians was a man who introduced himself as Bird Grinnell. That Grinnell? Yes, George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, editor of Forest and Stream and considered the world’s foremost expert on Plains Indians. He traced his ancestry to the Mayflower. He knew George Armstrong Custer long before the yellow-haired officer became an impetuous Indian fighter. He had grown up with people like Cornelius Vanderbilt—at one time the richest man in America—as a guest at the family house in Manhattan. He counted among his best friends an ambitious young politician, Theodore Roosevelt, just gearing up that summer to run for governor of New York. Ten years earlier, Grinnell and Roosevelt had founded the Boone and Crocket Club, devoted to preserving wildlife in order to have the opportunity to shoot it later. Oh, and it was Doctor George Bird Grinnell, a Ph.D. from Yale, though Curtis could call him Bird. Please.
Another mustachioed man warming his hands at Camp Muir was Clint Merriam. That Merriam? Yes. C. Hart Merriam, cofounder of the National Geographic Society, a zoologist and ornithologist by trade. He was the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. In that duty he had conducted an inventory of the natural world in the United States, a sort of Noah’s ark accounting of native plant and animal life before much of it disappeared. Though he knew more about birds than perhaps anyone else in the country, Merriam’s lasting contribution to the study of the land was his theory of “life zones,” used to classify the bioregions of the United States. Merriam’s wild turkey, among other species, was named for him. He was a doctor of medicine as well, though Curtis could call him Clint.
As for Mr. Curtis? He had dropped out of school before his twelfth birthday and later operated a picture studio in Seattle. His wife, now pregnant with their third child, helped to run the shop, along with other family members. Curtis wasn’t going to fake it. He could not fathom their academic argot. The names being tossed around—Roosevelt, Pinchot, Vanderbilt—he recognized from the papers. He was nobody compared to them, an itinerate preacher’s kid trying to make a name for himself in the city on the shores of Puget Sound.
Much of that reputation-building was linked to gold from Alaska. The rush to the Last Frontier had started a year earlier, bringing a stampede through Seattle and making a fortune for merchants—from the outfitting, financing and fleecing of hapless sourdoughs. Ever the opportunist, Curtis himself had taken advantage of the last great American gold rush, dispatching his brother Asahel to the frozen fields of the Klondike. Curtis followed him shortly thereafter. Back in Seattle, he dashed off a letter to Century Magazine, a leading popular journal. “I have just returned from a trip over different trails to the Alaskan gold fields, and have secured the most complete and the latest series of photos,” he wrote. He had witnessed the raw side of the scramble—dead horses in piles, flimsy tent villages, ramshackle towns. “In fact, these views depict every phase of the mad rush to the gold fields and portray the situation and the difficulties to be encountered more clearly and truthfully than can any mere pen picture.” It was quite a claim: a young man with no experience in journalism boasting that he had captured something that everyone else had missed in a big national story. But the gamble paid off. The March 1898 issue of Century carried a gripping narrative and pictures—“The Rush to the Klondike.”
The article made a splash for Curtis, but the professional triumph was a personal disaster on one level. His brother Asahel, who’d established the contacts in Alaska, taken some of the pictures and hauled thousands of glass-plate negatives and developing chemicals all through the Klondike in service of Curtis Inc., received no credit. He was furious. He said Edward had no right taking his photographs—the product of many frozen days in the wretched gold camps—and claiming them as his own. On the contrary, Edward said, those pictures belonged to the Curtis studio; his brother was an employee. After an explosive spat, Asahel quit. He took all his belongings from Edward’s home and promised to go out on his own and compete with the other Curtis. From then on, the brothers would not speak to each other. At chance encounters around town, they turned away, as to a stranger.
After detailing his somewhat exaggerated Alaskan experience to Merriam and Grinnell, Curtis told them he also knew a thing or two about Indians, though again, not from books. He had learned by observation. His pictures of Indians around Puget Sound had just been chosen for an exhibition sponsored by the National Photographic Society—the most prestigious showing in the country. And a few weeks earlier, while leading another Mazama expedition, to the top of Mount St. Helens, Curtis had come upon two Indians drying bark in the woods. He stayed behind to chat with the men and photograph them. This early Indian picture, owned by the Mazamas and almost never seen, is a startling piece of photojournalism, showing natives deep in a forest at the base of a restless mountain; they are wearing long pants and white men’s shirts, grimacing at the camera.
Grinnell and Merriam were intrigued by this lanky man who’d appeared out of the fog on a glacier, all blue eyes and bounce in his step. Just before Curtis “thawed them out and bedded them down,” as Curtis later conveyed to a friend, he mentioned a few more details about the tribes of the maritime West. This business of the potlatch, the Indian ritual of giving away worldly goods, was an extraordinary event. There was nothing more honorable. And yet government agen
ts were trying to ban the potlatch—they considered it barbaric, unfit for a race that needs to join the lot of civilization. Canada had made it a crime for Coast Salish people to participate in their most esteemed ceremony. The two men leaned into their rescuer: Tell us more.
A few days later, Curtis hosted the distinguished gentlemen at his studio, a showroom of the finest faces in Seattle and the most gloried scenery in the region. But the easterners were fascinated by his Indian pictures. A big part of his business now came from selling “Curtis Indians,” as they were advertised in a brochure, and his search for native people had taken him well beyond the city, east of the Cascades, where he found a band of the Nez Perce living at the edge of the Columbia River on wind-raked scablands. And farther east, into Montana, he’d gone for glimpses of buffalo-dependent tribes. His Indians were a startling departure from the usual depictions of these people. There were, in the faces, distinct human beings, not character types. How did he do it?
Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study. Though he’d gone many times to Rainier, much of the mountain had eluded him as a subject. He said it could take years to get it right, years when he might return from the glaciers empty-handed. You had to understand the essence of a thing before you could ever hope to capture its true self. And yes, he was trying to bring a painterly eye to the process, a subjective artistry. No reason to apologize. He believed that no two people could point a camera at something and come away with the same image. But, of course, photography involved a mechanical side as well, and there too, you could shape the final product to match a vision—to bring the right image to light from a stew of chemicals, to touch it up in a print shop, to finish with an engraving pen. Curtis never turned it off, never took time to play or let his mind roam, even at home. At night in the big Seattle house, “he studied pictures,” Clara’s cousin William Phillips recalled, “the whys and wherefores; the ifs and the ands: landscapes, portraits, marine views and studies from old masters. He reveled in such, in his musings, in his thoughts and conceptions.”
Curtis often slept in his studio, working until first light. In the early morning, when his wife arrived to open the shop for business, she would find him slumped against a wall, fresh-printed pictures spread all over the floor, his clothes wrinkled, cigarette stubs in a pile. And then he would snap to, rub his face and resume his work as if he’d never taken a break. He boasted that he needed very little sleep to function well; he had a prodigious amount of energy. His tank was always full.
“Wait till you see the next picture I make,” he would exclaim. “It’s going to be a crackerjack!”
His labors would be rewarded with one of the biggest prizes in American photography. The pictures prompted by Princess Angeline’s routine and repeat visits to the Tulalip reservation—The Clam Digger and The Mussel Gatherer, along with Homeward—had made the finals. And Homeward, which showed Puget Sound Indians in a high-bowed canoe backlit by the sun-infused clouds of early evening, won the grand prize: a gold medal from the National Photographic Society. Soon, those pictures would tour the world.
As impressed as the visitors were by Curtis the photographer and Curtis the mountaineer, they were equally interested in Curtis the amateur anthropologist. He had collected bits of mythology and tribal narratives along his picture-taking path, and wrote up summaries of these scraps of the Indians’ inner world. For decades Grinnell had fought to save the American bison, using his influential mouthpiece, Forest and Stream, to shame speculators of buffalo hides and skulls, the mindless poachers with rapid-fire rifles who had reduced a bounty of perhaps sixty million to a few hundred stragglers. Grinnell’s passion for lost causes was now focused on Plains Indians. The Pawnee, the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne—they’d been pushed to the brink, and their culture was being erased from the land of their grandparents. In Grinnell’s view, the way to understand Indians was to become more like them, rather than insist that the tribes become more like us. He had lived with Plains Indians for twenty seasons, could speak the language and many dialects, and had published Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales. The Blackfeet had made him an honorary member of the tribe. Grinnell feared that in just a few years’ time, these natives might end up like the buffalo.
To Grinnell and Merriam, departing from the Pacific Northwest after a fortuitous encounter on the region’s highest peak, this Curtis man seemed like quite the resourceful fellow. He knew Alaska, mountains and Indians. He was fast on his feet, quick with a joke, full of practical knowledge, physically heroic.
Over the winter, they stayed in touch. And in the spring of 1899 Merriam made a proposal to Curtis: how would he like to join the largest scientific exploration of Alaska ever undertaken? The idea came from the Gilded Age titan Edward Henry Harriman, who had just gained full control of the Union Pacific Railroad as part of a bigger scheme to monopolize rail traffic—much to the annoyance of his chief rival, J. P. Morgan. The deal-making had left Harriman, at the age of fifty-one, exhausted; his doctor recommended a long cruise. Harriman turned his hiatus into something much bigger. He strode into the Washington, D.C., office of C. Hart Merriam with a plan to stock a large ship with the finest zoologists, geologists, botanists and ethnologists and go forth in search of the unknown. Merriam would organize the scientific party. Harriman would pay for it all. It was to be the last great exploratory expedition of its kind in North America, dating to the Lewis and Clark journey a hundred years earlier. Curtis would be the official photographer.
The steamship George W. Elder left Seattle on the final day of May 1899, loaded down with milk cows and chickens, a well-stuffed library and a well-stocked bar, and 126 people, including two medical doctors, a chef and sous-chef, a chaplain, taxidermists, guides and the Harriman family. Curtis was the youngest and least credentialed member of the expedition, and he brought along an assistant, Duncan Inverarity, a friend from Seattle. Among those sailing north were the two best-known naturalists in America, John Muir and John Burroughs, both long-bearded and long-winded, called “the Two Johnnies.” Also on board was a lanky gentleman with faraway eyes whose name was constantly in the papers: Gifford Pinchot, a man of the woods, from a wealthy family. At night, the ship’s salon hosted arcane discussions by the scientists, speaking mostly in Latin, “fearfully and wonderfully learned,” as Burroughs put it. The German-born forester Bernhard Fernow played Beethoven on the grand piano. Pinchot went on at length about how the outdoors made him feel most alive. The Two Johnnies argued, a flutter of white beards and spokes of fingers poking each other’s chests. By day, the scientists would disembark in a particular bay, and then bring back all sorts of plants, fish and wildlife to the ship, where they were picked apart. The Elder steamed past the rainforest shores of southeast Alaska, up into Glacier Bay, through the inlets of Prince William Sound, out along the far edge of the Aleutian Islands, touching the Siberian shore—where Mrs. Harriman wanted to leave a footprint in Russia—and then back, a nine-thousand-mile round-trip. No junket, the expedition claimed to have discovered six hundred species new to science, putting some of the best minds of new-century America to good use.
For Curtis, the Elder was a floating university—an Ivy League one at that. From E. H. Harriman he learned how to operate an audio recording device, a wax cylinder that could pick up and preserve sound. It was an expensive, newfangled toy for the railroad tycoon and his seven-year-old son, Averell. Curtis realized the recorder could be used to preserve the songs and words of the people they observed along the way. Outside Sitka, the machine recorded a Tlingit chant. Curtis was closest to Grinnell, an easterner who acted more like a westerner and who conveyed a sense of urgency about the passing of so much that was original to the continent. Grinnell was a member of the expedition because of his knowledge of birds, but he seemed more interested in the native people they met. These villagers in animal skins and furs were ogled at by most of the scientists, treated like exotic species or fossilized relics. When the ship sailed into
a bay where women were skinning seals, most of the Harriman elites were repulsed by the smell and carnage. Curtis waded ashore and spent a day talking to the natives and taking pictures. The photographs show people who seem annoyed, at best, by the intrusion of well-outfitted Anglos. There are no moonlit silhouettes, no soft-focus portraits. The photos have a hard, documentary edge.
The Curtis method was simple: get as close as he could. He worked the same way with the landscapes. In shooting nearly five thousand photographs for the expedition, he sometimes leapt from iceberg to iceberg, slipped on polished stones in freezing streams and hiked to the edge of crevasses. Once, in his canoe in Glacier Bay, he tried to get close to a heaving ice field that was calving big chunks. Crewmen on board the Elder watched in amusement as Curtis paddled toward an enormous, berg-shedding glacier. He took several glass-plate impressions, then moved in closer. And then—horror. A calf of ice nearly ten times the size of the steamship broke away with a thunderous crack and splash, sending a wall of waves toward Curtis’s tiny canoe. “About half a mile of the front fell at once,” Burroughs wrote. The photographer paddled directly into a wave, a suicide impulse, it seemed. But instead of being crushed and drowned, Curtis rode the high waters to their crests—to the amazement of those watching from the deck of the ship. He lost some plates and equipment, but returned alive, his sense of invincibility hardened.
