by Timothy Egan
“I have written about the Indian for scientific magazines all my life and I have never seen one. I would like to learn about their life and logic.”
Curtis stormed outside. Here he had spent more time with native people than any of these so-called experts from the capital and he could not find a single financial backer. Yet this man—he made his living writing about Indians and had never seen one. He rushed off to the White House, where he had an appointment to photograph six tribal leaders. Snow patches covered the lawn, and Curtis shivered as he set up his tripod in an icy drizzle. The Indians who assembled on horseback wore feathered headdresses, some trailing down to their ankles, and were not in much of a mood for prolonged posing. The man in the middle, wrapped in a plain red army blanket, looked the most puckered and least amused: Geronimo. Curtis had met the leader of the Chiricahua Apache a few days earlier, at the Indian commissioner’s invitation. Geronimo was seventy-five, and the fire had yet to leave his eyes. “The spirit of the Apache is not broken,” Curtis wrote after spending time with him.
Born near the Gila River headwaters in New Mexico, Geronimo became a warrior after his wife, three small children and mother were slaughtered by Mexican soldiers in 1858. He would fight Anglos and Latinos of various uniforms for the next twenty-eight years, and take many wives. Among the Apache, though he was never a chief, he had mythic standing: it was said he could walk without leaving tracks, and defy bullets, injury and capture. He could make himself invisible. Near the end of his resistance, chased by five thousand troops—one fourth of the standing army—his followers numbered no more than thirty-six, for the raiding, nomadic Apache had many enemies, including other bands of the same tribe. His surrender in 1886 marked the formal end of organized military resistance by Indians to their conquerors.
After being captured, Geronimo was incarcerated at camps in Florida and Alabama. In old age, relocated to the compound of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo became a celebrity of the new century, the last of the “wild Indians,” now professing to embrace the pickled tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. Though in the slow-motion harmlessness of his old age, Geronimo needed government approval to leave the fort; he remained a prisoner of war for the rest of his days. President Roosevelt gave him permission to tell his life story to a writer, S. M. Barrett, and to attend the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. At the exposition, he sold autographed photos of himself for twenty-five cents apiece, keeping a dime in profit. On good days, he cleared two dollars.
In the life of Geronimo, Curtis saw much of Chief Joseph, and also a cautionary tale against Indian assimilation. The stories of clinging to the last bit of independence, of elusive escapes and long, dreary imprisonments in a strange land, were not unlike those of the Nez Perce leader. Still, Curtis was in Washington to take pictures, not to redress old wrongs. His outrage would have to be conveyed through his camera. In fashioning Geronimo’s portrait, after persuading him to pose in a separate sitting, Curtis resolved to transmit the truth of a hard man who would give up nothing for sympathy. He photographed him staring into the lens, bonnet on his head, clutching a spear. In that picture he looks shrunken, lost. Then he captured another man: Geronimo in profile, his entire upper body wrapped in a rough woolen blanket. This Geronimo is without a single bit of jewelry or ornamentation, and with only a simple cloth headband, as he used to wear in his youth. This Geronimo is a face—barely half of one—that is deeply lined, just like old Angeline. His brow is furrowed, his chin clenched. He looks away from the camera in a defiant snub for all time. Go to hell!
Not long after the inaugural, the pictures of the Roosevelt family at Sagamore Hill appeared in McClure’s Magazine. The president liked them so much he would use them in his autobiography. The fuss around the first family photos reinforced Curtis’s reputation as the premier portrait photographer in the United States. At the same time, he basked in a prolonged run of national publicity in magazines and big-city newspapers about his Indian work, matching the kind of press he was getting back home. Bird Grinnell’s piece in Scribner’s set the tone:
“It is easy to conceive that if Curtis shall have his health, and shall live for ten years, he will then have accumulated material for the greatest artistic and historical work in American ethnology that has ever been conceived of,” he wrote. “I have never seen pictures relating to Indians which, for fidelity to nature, combined with artistic feeling, can compare with these pictures by Curtis. Today they are of high scientific value. What will they be a hundred years from now when the Indians shall have utterly vanished from the face of the earth?”
Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the first full-time editor of National Geographic Magazine, was equally effusive. “He gave our Geographic Society the most wonderful exhibition last night I have seen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “We had about 1,000 people and they just sat and clapped and clapped. He showed about 130 pictures and they applauded nearly every one, though our audiences are usually very staid.”
For all of the adulation from men in high places, Curtis still could not get the financial backing he needed to continue. Meany was having trouble finding enough donors to bundle a loan. More publicity would help, he suggested. The favorable press seemed without limit; time was something else.
“As you were so good to say that I might write you in regard to this Indian work, I am losing no time in availing myself of the privilege,” Curtis wrote to President Roosevelt, on a dare and a prayer, while in Washington, D.C., for several exhibitions in late 1905. “Trusting I am not asking too much and again thanking you for your great interest in the work.” He requested a letter of introduction to Andrew Carnegie, one of the few tycoons on good terms with Roosevelt and who was planning to give away most of his fortune. Roosevelt didn’t know Carnegie well enough, and also considered him somewhat of a pain in the ass, always with the little nag notes to the president. Other rich men in the country despised Roosevelt, the Republican who had raged against “malefactors of great wealth” and waged court fights to break up their monopolies.
“There is no man of great wealth with whom I am on sufficient close terms to warrant my giving a special letter to him,” Roosevelt replied, understating the obvious. “But you are most welcome to use this letter in talking with any man who has any interest in the subject.” He continued with a stream of superlatives: “I regard the work you have done as one of the most valuable works which any American could do . . . You are making a record of the lives of the Indians which in another decade cannot be made at all, and which it would be the greatest misfortune, from the standpoint alike of the ethnologist and the historian, to leave unmade. You have begun just in time, for these people are at this very moment rapidly losing the distinctive traits and customs which they have slowly developed through the ages.”
It was a gold standard of a letter. The leader of the United States at the peak of his popularity, a prolific author as well, had written an endorsement for a project that was vital to the nation. Curtis read the reply as he prepared for another beggar’s trip to Manhattan in the chill of winter, his last chance to find a way to fully inflate the Big Idea. He would try to win the indifferent heart of the richest man in the world, so called, though he was told that a note on White House stationery would not help—and would probably hurt.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1904. Curtis was invited to the president’s family estate at Sagamore Hill to take pictures of the children. He talked Roosevelt into a sitting as well, and both men loved the resulting portrait.
Fun in the sand, 1904. Curtis was told to play with the kids at the summer White House. He helps bury a compliant dog with, left to right, Quentin, Archie and Nicholas Roosevelt.
At the Old Well of Acoma, 1904. Curtis made several trips to the Sky City of Acoma, New Mexico, the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States. The cisterns here caught the eye of Coronado when the Spanish arrived in 1540.
6. In the Den of the Titan
1906
WITHIN THE SHORT ARC of Edwa
rd Curtis’s life to date, the United States had gone from a scruffy nation of farmers and Main Street merchants to the foremost industrial power on the planet, and done so without a central bank. But while there was yet no Federal Reserve, there was the colossus of J. Pierpont Morgan, a crow-eyed collector of art, railroads and women, who made his fortune by timely bets on the most desirable commodities of the age. Morgan was no bootstrapper; there was no Horatio Alger in his story, this product of the best schools in the East and Europe. Morgan came from money and comfort, and converted a family stake into monopolies and a regal life. Napoleon was a personal hero; Morgan studied his military moves and matched them on the financial field. Having more money than anyone else meant the House of Morgan could spring when others were crippled, lend when rivals were barren of funds, own politicians without directly paying for them. Morgan was a predator with a plan, and largely bloodless. He took the competition out of railroads, corralled chaotic suppliers of electricity into the smooth-running trust of General Electric and shaped U.S. Steel to become the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. At the height of his powers, he was compared to Alexander the Great by a scholar at Yale, and disparaged as “a beefy, red-faced, thick-necked financial bully” by the progressive senator Robert M. La Follette. At the age of sixty-eight, with few financial castles left to conquer, Morgan was drawn to high Renaissance art and mistresses who knew how to make him laugh. He had six homes, and was getting ready to open a palace of marble to house his treasures next to his main residence, an imposing brownstone at 219 Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
Morgan conducted business a few miles downtown, in the heart of a financial district that was largely an ecosystem of his own making. His white marble lair at 23 Wall Street was to global capitalism what the Vatican was to Roman Catholicism. At the six-story building—known as “the Corner,” just across the street from the New York Stock Exchange—Morgan received monarchs, heads of state, senators, congressmen and silk-vested sycophants from all areas of moneymaking. Women were allowed to enter the inner sanctum but once a year, a formality designed to show that Morgan had a touch of enlightenment. Morgan was thinking of razing the building and replacing it with a neoclassical limestone fortress, daunting and impenetrable to outsiders.
It was at the entrance of 23 Wall Street that Edward Curtis presented himself on the twenty-fourth day of January 1906, with a last-chance plan to keep his Indian project alive. Within a few months, Morgan would be spending most of his time at his new library, at the corner of Madison and Thirty-sixth Street. The manse next door, Morgan’s home, had been the first in New York to be entirely illuminated with electric light. By contrast, the library was an homage to antiquity: it was built using the ancient Greek technique of fitting massive marble blocks one atop another—precision construction using almost no mortar. Nothing could be more costly. During the design phase, he had made so many demands that his architect, Charles F. McKim, suffered a nervous breakdown. Inside, visitors would pass through a pair of bronze doors into a rotunda with curved walls of mosaic panels. The apse was based on Raphael’s design for the Villa Madama in Rome. The ceilings throughout the library were clouded with narrative art. The den was stuffed with more carved stone, more masterpieces, and its ceiling woodwork was chipped from its anchor in a fifteenth-century Tuscan palazzo. Directly across from the study, where the architect had wanted high windows to let in light on his creation, Morgan walled off the space so he could hang another acquisition: a huge, four-hundred-year-old tapestry titled The Triumph of Avarice.
A long letter from Curtis had arrived in advance of the photographer’s appointment. Despite his desperation, Curtis conveyed his usual breezy brio. “When I call to see you tomorrow afternoon, you can see what I am like.” He then went on to the significance of the task; no use throat-clearing. “As to the artistic merit, it must speak for itself, and no one can be a better judge of that than yourself.” A pinch of flattery—of course. Morgan was the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the foremost market force in that high cultural realm; he could indeed judge for himself. But just in case: “I feel the work is worthwhile and as a monumental thing, nothing can exceed it.” And then a cut to the chase: “I have the ability, strength, and determination to finish the undertaking, but have gone to the end of my means and must ask someone to join me in the undertaking and make it possible for all ages of Americans to see what the American Indian was like. Whatever the outcome of our meeting, let me now thank you for your courtesy in allowing me to bring the matter before you.”
Morgan had only the vaguest notion of what an American Indian was like, but few people had so altered the destiny of the tribes as had the lion of Wall Street. He had gone west for the first time in 1869, not long after completion of the transcontinental railroad. At a stop in Nebraska, young Morgan and his wife, Franny, ran into a group of Pawnee Indians—“horrid-looking wild creatures with no clothes to speak of,” as a member of their party recalled. When a native approached Morgan, he beat a hasty retreat to his private rail car. Later, Morgan’s consolidation of the railroads, eventually joining corporate cause with E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill, led to a growth spurt that created the largest rail network in the world. In a short time, the buffalo prairies and game-rich valleys of the open West were laced with steel roads, servicing all manner of newcomers and prospectors of property. Buffalo Bill Cody got his start killing bison for railroad crews. The tribes knew they were doomed when the smoky exhalations of the iron horses filled the skies of the Great Plains, for an obsidian-tipped spear could bring down a five-hundred-pound buffalo, but it was worthless against metal-hulled trains carrying immigrants to Indian country. In a single decade, the 1880s, more than seventy-five thousand miles of track were tacked to the ground, and nearly three million people moved west.
No sentimentalist in business, Morgan did have a soft spot for beautiful things, whether on canvas or fitted into a tailored dress. No art-rich estate or château in Europe was safe from his wandering buyer’s eye. In 1898, he spent $300,000 on The Progress of Love, fourteen decorative panels by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, commissioned in 1771. Three years later, he bought a fifteenth-century Raphael (a Perugian altarpiece) for $400,000—at the time, the most expensive art purchase in the world. He topped himself again in 1902 when he paid $700,000 for the contents of a British squire’s private library. Books were particularly appealing to Morgan, a bibliophile with a taste for big names. He owned a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a vellum Gutenberg Bible, original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the fussed-over manuscript of A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens classic written in 1843. These treasures were all bound for the new library.
Edward Curtis wanted nothing more than to be part of Morgan’s collection. In his advance letter, he outlined the project: “The plan in mind is to make a complete publication, showing pictures and including text of every phase of Indian life of all tribes yet in a primitive condition, taking up the type, male and female, child and adult, their home structure, their environment, their handicraft, games, ceremonies etc.; dividing the whole into twenty volumes containing fifteen hundred full-page plates, the text to treat the subject much as the pictures do, going fully into their history, life and manners, ceremony, legends and mythology, treating it in rather a broad way so that it will be scientifically accurate, yet if possible interesting reading.”
The last line was central to the Curtis task. Yes, he was creating something scientific, something artistic, something that would withstand the ages, something that must be done now! But as a self-educated product of a new middle class with broad tastes, Curtis also wanted his work to be read outside the claustral realm of academia. He was not doing this to be praised by the small circle of Indian scholars, though he certainly wanted their approval. Most everything scholarly on the subject, he implied, was tedious, if not damn near impossible to read.
Now, to the money: “It has been estimated by publishers that a work of this natu
re would have to sell at five thousand dollars a set, and that one hundred sets could be disposed of in this country and abroad. To finish the field work will require five more years at an approximate annual expense of $15,000 for the five years—$75,000.” There you had it, what every businessman looks for: the bottom line. Twenty volumes. Five years to complete. And $75,000 total. It would be not only one of the world’s costliest literary projects, but the rarest of books: the total print run would be a hundred sets.
Curtis mentioned in closing that he had already spent $25,000 of his own money, and that while his bankbook was empty, he still had his life to give, and was willing to put it up as collateral so that Morgan would never lose a penny. “To further safeguard the patron of the work, I could insure my life . . .”
The next day, Curtis presented himself in the afternoon to make his case in person. He had gotten this far—that is, through the bronze doors of 23 Wall Street—because of his connections, though not the political ones. President Roosevelt was a liability. It was no secret, as T.R. had mentioned in his letter to Curtis, that the “man of great wealth” despised Roosevelt, and the feeling was mutual. When the United States first went after Morgan’s railroad trust in 1902, the mogul thought everything could be settled by gentleman’s agreement. “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it.” Roosevelt replied, “That can’t be done.” Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled for Roosevelt, and the monopoly was broken, though Morgan seemed not to suffer in the least. Another man of wealth was Pinchot, the forester and top Roosevelt adviser who had inherited a private fortune made by his grandfather in the timber industry. Pinchot also hated Morgan. And Pinchot, while encouraging Curtis, had turned down the photographer when he asked for a $7,000 loan. A better ace in the hole for Curtis was the leader of the Alaska expedition, E. H. Harriman. Not only was Harriman a Morgan partner in the railroad consolidation (after years of being at each other’s throats), but he had spread his patron wings wide, in Morgan’s same circles. The year before, Harriman had arranged for a New York show of Curtis’s work, and invited the influential critics and patrons in the city to view rare pictures of the “curious rites, ceremonies and customs” of Indians—a bit of a carnival come-on for the New York elite. It cost Curtis $1,300 to rent the ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Hundreds of the city’s swell set turned out, and sales were brisk. Among the admirers was Louise Satterlee, Morgan’s daughter. The critics raved, elevating his work to a national cause célèbre. “We are painting our plains, protecting our forests, creating game preserves, and at last—not saving the existence of our North American Indian, the most picturesque roving people on earth,” declared the Craftsman, an influential photography magazine. “Just one man, an American, an explorer, an artist with the camera, has conceived and is carrying into execution the gigantic idea of making a complete photographic and text record of the North American Indians so far as they exist in primitive conditions today.”
