by Timothy Egan
The famous men assembled by the railroad tycoon liked the photographer. He was self-deprecating, brash, tireless, able to handle the repartee of big egos in tight quarters—and certainly obsequious without being annoying. He was also sincerely interested in learning from them. “His earnestness, industry, simplicity and innocence are positively contagious,” wrote William Phillips, in explaining the most attractive qualities of young Curtis.
Near the end of the Alaskan summer, the ship steered into what appeared to be an abandoned Tlingit village on Cape Fox—a ghostly place to the Harriman experts. But the empty village was alive in a way the experts could never know. The artwork, the totem poles and posts, the masks, the carved raven heads and salmon designs were animate objects to the Tlingit, each with a power of its own. The scientists took hundreds of artifacts from the village, to the disgust of John Muir, who felt his shipmates were no better than common looters. These distinguished scholars would never haul away paintings and statues from an empty church in Europe. The men were preserving culture, they insisted, not robbing a village. Plundering a native community was justified as a rescue for the sake of science; the artifacts were bound for museums in the United States.
To Grinnell, who’d been brooding for much of the trip, the majestic but strangely empty site on Cape Fox only confirmed what he’d been saying about the inhabitants of the big land: their way of life was passing. Every collision between the native world and modernity was a hopeless mismatch. The Indians were doomed. And here was all the evidence he needed: a dead village, like a body still warm to the touch. He confided these concerns to Curtis, who said he also was appalled that educated and celebrated men would steal so many priceless objects. Next year, Grinnell said, he planned to return to a place that curious outsiders had yet to pick apart, to take in a native ceremony on the high plains of Montana, and to do so in a respectful manner. For centuries, the people who lived where mountain and prairie came together had gathered during the longest days of the year to praise the sun. Missionaries and the government’s Indian agents were closing in. The Indians’ central ritual would soon be gone, outlawed like the potlatch. Grinnell was privileged to witness the ceremony because of his standing among the Blackfeet. He planted an idea with Curtis: why not see for yourself and get it down for posterity? On the deck of the ship as it steamed back to Seattle, Grinnell made an offer that would set the course for the rest of Curtis’s life. “Come with me next year,” he said. “You’ll have a chance to know Indians.”
The climber: Curtis on Mount Rainier in 1897, from a booklet he published of mountaineering photos and adventures. (The picture is cropped.)
Two Indians drying bark in the woods of Mount St. Helens. Curtis took this rarely seen picture in 1898, while on a climbing expedition with the Mazamas.
3. The Big Idea
1900
IN THE SUMMER OF 1900, Curtis boarded the Great Northern Railroad for a trip east to an Indian land that existed only in the imagination of most Americans. His train chugged through a long tunnel inside the Cascade Mountains, out past the glacier-scarred indents of coulee country in central Washington, straight to the rail center of Spokane. From there the tracks headed north, nearly to the Canadian border, and then east again. The train huffed across the Rockies of western Montana, up, up, up, straining to straddle the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, 5,215 feet above sea level, the highest point of the most northerly of the nation’s transcontinental railroads. Through the mountains that would be enshrined by decade’s end as Glacier National Park the train went, and then down, down, down, a dramatic transition from forest green to prairie brown and high flat ground to a knot of small buildings, a dwelling house, two hotels, a store. His destination, Browning, Montana, was a whistle stop on the Great Northern line, but also the heart of the Blackfeet Nation.
The emptiness startled him. The wind nearly knocked him down. A one-man expedition, Curtis gathered his cameras and notebooks, his sketchbooks and tent, his sleeping roll and extra clothes and a wax cylinder recorder. As the dust flew in early evening, he was met by Bird Grinnell, a warm reunion. It was the Pawnee from the Great Plains who had first given the doctor from Yale the name of Bird, because he appeared every year in the spring and then would migrate somewhere when the cold weather came. And it had been with the Pawnee, in 1872, that Grinnell had witnessed their last great buffalo hunt, an adrenaline-surged spectacle of half-ton prey chased by nimble athletes on horseback.
The wind from the prairie, gathering momentum as it swept down from the province of Alberta, made it difficult to hold a conversation outside the leaky frame walls of the Browning general store. Curtis could see why a tree was unable to cling to the hard earth at four thousand feet on the Montana high ground. The men outfitted their horses, then took off at a trot back toward the mountains, where the plains buckled up and rose. They were crossing twenty miles or so of buffalo country, amber fields of grass pocked by hollows where the bigheaded beasts took dust baths to keep mosquitoes away. But there was not a bison in sight; few had been seen for two decades, Grinnell told his acolyte. Bird turned fifty that summer, almost twenty years older than Curtis, with half a lifetime’s knowledge from living with Plains Indians to impart to the younger man. Their purpose was one part adventure, one part anthropology and one part mercenary, for both men knew their access to this lost world could fill a lecture hall later.
This trip to the Blackfeet Nation was also the test of an idea starting to take shape—that those “Curtis Indian” fragments sold by his studio could form part of a much bigger picture story. Grinnell encouraged Curtis, urged him to be expansive, but he also stripped him of his more romantic notions. He was both mentor and tormentor. What are you really looking for? Grinnell asked Curtis. Why are you shooting all these pictures of Indians in the first place? Curtis explained that he was doing it “for his own amusement,” as Grinnell wrote later. Also, Indian pictures were a lucrative part of his business. He could charge a premium for a typical studio portrait, but those branded Curtis Indians—the pictures he’d taken around Puget Sound and on the Columbia Plateau—were selling for much higher prices. It was telling that Curtis put every surplus dollar back into the “amusement” work; that was what made his heart race now, even more than climbing mountains.
Grinnell pressed him further. He wondered if Curtis had ever thought about putting together a book, or an exhibition at the Smithsonian, where Americans could see what was slipping away. Curtis could rouse the nation to action, as Grinnell had done on behalf of keeping a small bison herd intact in Yellowstone. Grinnell’s crusade had won over many influential people, including Teddy Roosevelt, who’d just made the step from governor of New York to vice president of the United States. Indeed, Curtis replied, he had thought about doing something grand and consequential. “The idea dawned on him that here was a wide field as yet unworked,” Grinnell wrote. “Here was a great country in which still live hundreds of tribes and remnants of tribes, some of which still retain many of their primitive customs and their ancient beliefs. Would it not be a worthy work, from the points of view of art and science and history, to represent them all by photography?”
Curtis had tried to take pictures of these plains natives two years earlier, in 1898, but came home with little to show for it. Now, with Grinnell, Curtis had a flesh-and-blood passport to something an outsider could not see on his own. With Bird at his side, he was a tourist no more—he was in training.
As for the late-afternoon thunderheads, twirls of dust devils and biting flies drawn to horse flesh and the softer human kind—who could complain? Push on, Curtis urged, push on. He’d been promised much more than a peek: a chance to witness the Sun Dance, the oldest and most important religious ceremony to the Piegan, Bloods and related tribes, resettled on the Blackfeet reservation because of common bonds. Any inconvenience was a trifle compared to what lay ahead.
They crossed a plateau, the wind tossing thistle over the prairie, and galloped ever higher, to the near
exhaustion of their mounts. Grinnell signaled a slowing as they seemed to run out of ground. Dismount, he ordered. The two men took the reins of their horses and walked toward a cliff’s edge, Curtis curious and willful, Grinnell’s eyes trained ahead. They stepped up to the rim of a high precipice. Below was an encampment, a circle of large tipis, more than two hundred of them by Curtis’s count, forming an enclosure a mile or so in diameter. The Indians had brought horses, wagons, carts, food and the painted buffalo skins that stretched around pine poles to form their lodges.
Ever since the daughter of Chief Seattle had caught his eye in the tidal flats, Curtis had been looking for a community of Indians to cast in lasting light on his camera glass. Mostly he’d found only snippets of life here and there, broken from the whole. There was nothing of a people living in continuity with the past. Nothing intact. But here—look at it!—just below the cliff were generations, as many children as grandchildren. By historical standards, the Piegan encampment was small, but Curtis had never witnessed so many Indian people together in one place. The only thing to compare to this group, for sheer numbers, was the engraving he had seen as a child of Indians hanged in that mass execution in Minnesota.
Take it all in, Grinnell told him. Take a long, long look. To Bird Grinnell, the scene below the cliff already belonged to yesterday. For one thing, the Holy Family Mission, aided by government Indian agents, was doing all it could to put an end to this ceremony. The Sun Dance was considered savagery, matching the law’s description of an “immoral dance.” Under the Indian Religious Crimes Code, anything deemed unwholesomely pagan could be banned—dances, feasts, chants led by medicine men. The regulations were specific: “Any Indian who shall engage in the sun dance, scalp dance, or war dance, or any other similar feast, so called, shall be deemed guilty of an offense.” As punishment, the agents could withhold food rations and imprison participants of traditional religious ceremonies for up to ninety days.
The churches had been given broad discretion from the government to spread doctrine and charity among the Indians, a clear violation of the First Amendment’s religious establishment clause. Few politicians seemed to mind. “The Indians,” said Thomas J. Morgan, the man appointed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889 to oversee their affairs, “must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.” The churches would give them spiritual sustenance; the government agents would dole out food and goods. The system was fraught with corruption, and enforced by patronage hacks and militant missionaries. “This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get,” said Morgan. “They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.” Forced assimilation never had a more clearly stated goal.
After the mission was established on the Montana prairie in 1890, young Blackfeet were taken from the tribe and sent to a three-story brick boarding school, fifteen miles from Browning. The idea was to rinse the native out of them and cleanse them with western Christianity. A big part of that effort was to get the boys to reject the illegal Sun Dance. A year’s worth of missionary reeducation could be undone by just a few days in summer at the traditional ceremony. If the Piegan were to avoid the fate of Angeline’s people, they would have to start the new century by joining the modern world, the clerics insisted. Give up the chanting and dancing, the prayers to the sun and the earth, the mumbo jumbo. An ancient festival paying homage to a blinding star was barbaric.
In 1900, census takers were in the field, making a concerted effort, at long last, to count every Indian—this at a time when all violent hostilities between the original inhabitants of the continent and the new residents had finally come to an end. The frontier was closed, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced a few years earlier—there was no longer a line to push west nor a big empty space on the map to be filled in with immigrants. This caused a great fuss among the pulse takers of American life. The early reports of the count were not good: the number of Indians was down, dramatically so. And the population figures conformed with other indicators of decline: by 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared—more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world. All of this had been predicted for some time, and was taken as accepted wisdom. As far back as 1831, the prescient observer Alexis de Tocqueville had said this of American Indians: “They were isolated in their own country, and their race constituted only a little colony of troublesome strangers in the midst of numerous dominant people.”
Throughout the afternoon and into the early evening Curtis took pictures of these “troublesome strangers” from above: the encampment; the practical lodges, big enough to provide shelter for an extended family; the stretched animal skins outside, painted with symbols that told a story in a compact wraparound. Curtis worked without pause, moving across the cliff’s edge, reacting to the changing light, slipping the heavy plates from his camera into a sealed container, then reloading.
Grinnell was impressed by his passion. Two years after meeting Curtis on the volcano, he saw in him a rare combination. Here was “a professional photographer, equipped with all the skill required in the technical part of that business,” Grinnell wrote, “but he is also an artist, seeing and loving the beautiful and longing to reproduce it.” And everything below, the sweep of tradition and majesty on one of the longest days of the year—it was fantastic, yes, Grinnell said. But the view was superficial as well, offering only a glancing impression.
“Their humanity has been forgotten,” Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians—as either savages or victims. The Piegan had gathered to pay homage to the Great Mystery, Bird explained. And if Curtis expected to understand that mystery, in order to take pictures that were true, he would need to go down below and get to know the people. The glory was in the eyes, in the faces, in understanding how they thought and what they did in the margins of a day.
Bird took him to the encampment. It was important, he cautioned, not to come on too strong, too eager. Relax. Soak it all in. Smile. These people are not specimens, not fauna to be categorized and put under microscopes as on the Harriman expedition. They are just human beings, no more complicated or simplistic than others, no more heroic for their survival or tragic for their loss. Laugh at yourself. Don’t be afraid to appear stupid: imagine an Indian walking into an Elks Lodge in downtown Seattle, uninvited. Curtis said he had established a rule, born in part by his revulsion at the Harriman party’s looting: he would not take a picture without offering to pay, or without the subject’s permission. A fine guiding principle to Grinnell, but he urged the young man not to start in right away with cash and exchanges. Take time to get acquainted. Here is White Calf, chief of the Blackfeet—a friend, nearly sixty years old. Over there is Tearing Lodge, another revered elder, seventy years old. And that hard-eyed man on horseback, scowling as he circles the edge of the encampment, that is Small Leggins. He doesn’t like you.
The whites had said many things about these plains dwellers, commenting on their rituals of self-mutilation and fasting, their soaks in sweat lodges and their naked dashes into the snow, the way they dispatched enemies, torturing and gutting them and taking the women as slaves. Little of what had been written was accurate, Grinnell said. George Catlin, the most famous American graphic documentarian of Indians in the nineteenth century, had come home with many fanciful drawings and even more fanciful conjectures. Catlin had called the Blackfeet “perhaps the most powerful tribe of Indians on the continent.” They certainly had a reputation for toughness, for feuding fiercely with other tribes, for violence that didn’t follow the norms of Anglo-European warfare. But “most powerful”? No, not by any stretch. They were too small in number for that. The Comanche, the hard-riding, merciless Lords of the Plains, who dominated much of Texas and the Southwest, could rout the Blackfeet in an afternoon, had they come into a fight.
If the stories are contradictory, Grinnell
continued, put two or more sources together and try to settle on the truth. Ask the same question repeatedly—but ask it of the people themselves. Don’t bother with those who profess to know Indians because they live nearby, the merchants who scorn them or the ranchers who run cattle over the old buffalo grass. Nor should he waste his time with the anthropologists of eastern colleges or European universities, who divided themselves between the Noble Savage school and the racial determinists who saw Darwinian roadkill in the collapse of the tribes. And he certainty should avoid the do-gooders in black robes who were oh so sorry for the poor, pathetic Indians as they worked to tally converts. Finally, Grinnell reserved special scorn for government agents, the frontline enforcers of assimilation, the faces of a conqueror who made sure no sensible policy would ever be practiced.
Taking Grinnell’s advice, Curtis established another plank for the cathedral of a plan he was building in his mind: “Information at all times must be drawn from the Indians.” Over the days, Curtis listened. The Indians were skeptical, of course, of this stranger that Bird had brought into their midst. Small Leggins followed Curtis with his eyes, an orbit of staring. The man with the camera and wax recorder heard stories of their origins, their hopes, the great losses they had suffered from disease and a deathly hunger that followed the collapse of the buffalo herds. In one winter, 1883–84, the Piegan lost a fourth of their population to starvation—a “winter of misery and death,” Curtis wrote. He wondered about a few of the more dark-skinned natives, and was told they were descendants of a black slave called York, who had passed among these people nearly a hundred years earlier with Lewis and Clark. Curtis smoked a ceremonial pipe. He learned that a person should never look his mother-in-law in the face or talk to her directly. He was invited into a sweat lodge. He stripped naked and sat as the water poured out of him, until he nearly passed out, delirious and hallucinating, “until I heard far-away music where there could be no music,” as he wrote to a friend back home. But he remained Edward S. Curtis of Seattle, the portrait photographer. He would not try to fake or play at being an Indian.
