Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  Myers was two years older than Bill Phillips, who had been working for Curtis since his student days at the University of Washington. Now twenty-six, Phillips had become a jack-of-all-trades for the Indian enterprise. He would find translators, arrange for food and transport, set up portrait sessions and locations for outdoor shoots, smooth disagreements and take copious notes. Phillips was in awe of Curtis, impressed by the audacity of his leaps to the upper reaches of American society and by the vision of the Big Idea. Rounding out the traveling crew was at least one translator, depending on the tribal band, and a steady cook named Justo, who had the added skill of being a horse wrangler.

  Outside the field team, Curtis made one other hire that year, a plum for him: Frederick Webb Hodge, a Smithsonian ethnologist and scholar of American Indians. Curtis had been courting him for three years. English born, Hodge was trained as an anthropologist and historian but did his best work applying authoritative polish to other people’s words. He was forty-one when he agreed to become the long-term editor for Curtis, at $7 per thousand words. He would also keep his day job at the Smithsonian, where he was overseeing The Handbook of American Indians, considered the definitive guide in the field. Unlike other Washington experts, Hodge had visited tribal lands—Acoma, the Navajo reservation, the Zuni Nation—many times. To have the prose of a self-educated photographer acquire the imprimatur of Hodge assured Curtis that the most ambitious literary undertaking of the new century would not be easily dismissed in learned circles.

  Finally, Curtis had with him a wide-eyed and worshipful twelve-year-old boy, his son Hal. He rode on horseback beside his towering father, ahead of the wagon. He delighted in watching Curtis orchestrate the field team—“directing the activities, looking after the welfare of everyone”—and was brought into the larger discussion of how to extract the secrets of the Apache. In all, it was a boy’s dream.

  The two-million-acre Apache reservation presented itself to the Curtis party as a wave of mountains and high mesas, much of it forested in oak and cedar, pine, cottonwood, alder and walnut, with cacti throughout. The lowlands looked jungled to Curtis, a profusion of wild grapes and vines, more like parts of the Cascade Mountains than the whiskered tablelands of central Arizona. This June, the wildflowers had opened to a chorus of bright color, the columbines in full-throated blossom. Curtis followed a wagon trail through Black Canyon, a valley of thick-armored oaks that led to a protected fold of land forking left. Most of the tribe of about two thousand people lived near the head of the canyon, in a village called White River.

  The Curtis party settled in. Their task was to soak up a culture—legends, quirks, habits, history, diet, sex life, songs, myths and religion. In the first few days on Apache land, Curtis got sick and was confined to camp, frustrating him. It did nothing to dampen his resolve. “I have unfortunately been ill,” he wrote Hodge. “But one thing is certain: at the time I quit the Apache reservation, there will be a good many questions answered as to the inner life of the Apache.”

  The tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right—everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life. What Curtis wanted, to watch and record the Apache praying in their customary way, could make him an accomplice to a crime. At the same time, natives who worked with him were seen as traitors to their own people. “Old friends looked the other way,” Curtis wrote. “One of my former interpreters, learning of my purpose, declined to have anything to do with me, declaring he was not going out in search of sudden death.” His strategy, as before, was to appear indifferent, “to be just a sucker furnishing the food and paying for the privilege—perhaps in playing that part I was a natural.” Still, the enterprise had money in a poor land, no small thing. Curtis drew into his orbit the cautiously curious and those looking to earn something. And at night, women, too, came to the camp, and Curtis was tempted.

  “Some of the maidens needed no sales argument,” Curtis wrote. He was unsure if this was a trick—a way to get him arrested—or prostitution, or something in between. Apache mothers arrived in the dark with their teenage daughters and drew erotic pictures in the sand—come-ons that indicated the kind of sexual romp that awaited him. Curtis kept his professional distance from the women, he wrote, while doing everything he could to get close to those who knew the religious secrets. He recognized some of the medicine men from his previous work; the incantations were also familiar. But over and over again, when Curtis asked questions about certain words in the Apache language, he was rebuffed with a single refrain:

  “We don’t know.”

  Then what about a symbol, he would ask—why was it drawn in such a way?

  “To make it look pretty.”

  At night, staring at the starry infinity of the Arizona sky, young Hal wondered about the Indian explanation for the twinkling overhead. Inspired by his father, he said, “I will get the Indian boys to talk with me about all of this.” But he had no more luck than did his dad.

  By July, after six weeks in Apache country, Curtis had little to show. “We had only succeeded in building up a wall of tribal reticence. Every member of the tribe understood that no one was to talk to us, and a delegation of the chiefs had visited the Indian agent in charge, demanding that I leave the reservation.”

  Facing banishment, Curtis promised to close up shop soon—but kept the departure date uncertain. “Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.” At the same time, he narrowed his quest to a single medicine man, named Goshonné. In the predawn darkness Curtis and a translator crawled through the brush to spy on Goshonné as he chanted. It was beautiful, a morning prayer that moved Curtis. He went again and again to listen. Though Curtis was a religious voyeur on his stomach in the dust, he felt his actions were justified because the world had so miscast Apaches as pagans. One day, at the close of prayer, Curtis sprang from the bushes and revealed himself. Goshonné was upset, angry and threatening—how dare this white man spy on him? He was a respected elder, and also had spent time in jail for openly practicing medicine man pharmacology.

  Curtis expressed sympathy. He had watched Goshonné to learn from him, not to report him. He raged against the Indian Religious Crimes Code, a cultural bulldozer scraping away centuries of tradition. And, in a naked appeal to Goshonné’s needs beyond the spiritual realm, Curtis offered a sizable financial prize for the medicine man’s knowledge. Over cigarettes, the two men talked for several days. Near the end of their negotiations, Goshonné took frequent steam baths and plunges into the White River. Curtis wondered: what was that about? Go­shonné explained that he was trying to cleanse himself. For Curtis, this was a good thing: it meant he was getting ready to share insider knowledge with an outsider. In the end, it was not the force of Curtis’s personality that nudged Goshonné along; it was the cash.

  A few days earlier, for a substantial fee, Curtis had been allowed to take pictures of a deerskin scroll holding symbols of the Apache creation myth—a page from a bible, essentially. This was a huge step. But only a medicine man could explain the drawings on the skin. When the deal with Goshonné was completed, he took Curtis and a translator to a secluded place in the woods and talked for half a day, answering their questions in a slow and deliberate manner. Curtis made audio recordings and filled several notebooks. Back in camp, he was gleeful: the tribal secrets—a complex and lengthy description of how the world came to be—were out.

  In addition, Curtis learned many everyday things from his stay. A full-blooded Apache never took a scalp. Their language, an Athapaskan dialect, had no profanity. The Apache feared the dead, for ghosts could exact revenge. Their diet was mixed—piñon nuts, acorns, mescal pulp, juniper berries and the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, supplemented by protein from wild turkey, antelope, deer, rabbit, quail. Eating bear or fish was forbidden. Water containers were made of woven sumac coated in piñon gum. Tribal government was weak or nonexistent. The medicine man had more
influence than anyone, and was a keeper, until death, of the skin that explained how people came to be. After this season with the Apache, what Curtis wanted the world to know was the opposite of what he had been told at the Smithsonian, which was peddled in almost any story written about the tribe. “The Apache is inherently devoutly religious; his life is completely molded by his religious beliefs,” Curtis wrote in his first volume of The North American Indian. “From the morning prayer to the rising sun, through the hours, the days, and months—throughout life itself—every act has some religious significance.”

  The breakthrough with Goshonné opened the way for the pictures. At last—faces. Apache Girl, bare-shouldered, her skin just above the nipple of her left breast exposed to soft light, was memorable. Das Lan, a medicine man who was a rival of Goshonné’s, posed for Curtis with a scholarly stare. Alchise is a thin-faced, cerebral-looking Apache chief in early middle age, his face illuminated by midday sun. Bathing Pool and By the Sycamore show people as an integral part of the land. Depicting a woman harvesting food, Cutting Mescal is a Southwest version of Curtis’s The Clam Digger. A motion-blurred platinum print, Before the Storm, is extraordinary for the multiple messages in the frame: four Indians on horseback moving away from the camera, a lone face looking back, a foreboding sky overhead, wind-rustled yucca plants in the foreground, all shot from a low angle. And the trophy that Curtis most wanted the public to see: Sacred Buckskin, which was hand colored in the finish.

  “I think I can say that the Apache work has been quite successful—far more than I had hoped for,” Curtis wrote Hodge. But it came at a price. In trying to extract secrets of a religion for a public that doubted whether the Apache even had one, Curtis had disrupted the sacred rhythms. Just as Curtis was packing to leave the White Mountain reservation, Goshonné showed up in camp. He was twitchy, breathless, ashen-faced, angry at himself and at Curtis. The outsiders’ mood darkened immediately, from triumph to edgy second-guessing.

  “I am sorry I talked,” said Goshonné.

  “Why?”

  “Spies watched us and know my words have gone to the white man. My words are on the white man’s paper and I cannot take them back.” Curtis tried to reassure him; he would never reveal that it was Goshonné who had collaborated. No, no, Curtis did not understand—the word was already out about the medicine man’s role. They knew. Goshonné trembled, visibly afraid, cursing himself for betraying his people and their gods.

  “My life will be short,” he said over and over, shaking his head, his fists clenched. “All the medicine men have said it.”

  Not long after Curtis returned to Seattle, after he had brought the faces of the Apache to life in his studio, he received word that Go­shonné had died an early death, cause unknown.

  North, about fifty miles from the Apache village, Curtis steered his covered wagon into Gallup, New Mexico Territory, answering the call of a long-delayed family obligation. Curtis had been on the road constantly since he set off with the Harriman expedition in 1899. Even by the standards of the late exploration era, when men would leave their loved ones for years at a time, Curtis was an absentee father and husband. When he dropped by his home in Seattle, Clara would greet him with silence or forced indifference, the children remembered. Questions about his fidelity followed.

  Curtis admitted to having a mistress, an insatiate one—The North American Indian. Everything else was secondary. He certainly shared with Alfred Stieglitz an obsession with perfection. “Nearly right,” Stieglitz once said, “is child’s play.” But Curtis wanted to be a father, as evidenced by his attempt to bring the children to him, even if he couldn’t go to them, even if he was not there for birthdays or by a bedside when a child fell sick. Clara the teenager had nursed Curtis back to health after he mangled his back. Clara the woman had been mother to three children, the keeper of schedules, the provider of clothes and food, getting them all off to school, doctors’ appointments and baseball games, all of it. Clara the manager had held the studio together on nights when bill collectors came calling and days when tout Seattle wanted a tour. And she had to put up with the questions from friends and neighbors. Where is he now? At times, she didn’t know. Was he in Montana with the Crow, or in the Dakotas with the Sioux, or in Wyoming with the Assiniboin? And how was the Curtis clan going to make ends meet while the Shadow Catcher worked for free and the portrait business languished? He offered reassurances, a kiss on the cheek, a hug for each child, and then, as always, rush rush rush out the door and down to the train station, away to other families.

  Throughout 1906, Curtis tried to save his marriage. The magnificent early months of that year—the meeting with Morgan, exhibitions in Washington and New York, parties with well-heeled lovers of his “art,” the wedding of Alice Roosevelt, a lecture in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie gallery, a trip to Boston to set up copper-plate engravings by John Andrew & Son—had all been with Clara. They shared those best of times; she was in on the creation, the act of becoming Edward S. Curtis. He had shown her the part of his world that included the East Coast power brokers. And now, as he greeted Clara and the children at the train terminal in New Mexico, he finally had a chance to show her the other part of his life.

  By horseback and wagon, the Curtis family and The North American Indian entourage traveled from Gallup over barren terrain, through the high reaches of a stubby piñon forest, then to a treeless desert, past mesas and over arroyos, to the town of Chinle in the heart of the Navajo Nation. The mobile family photography project was weighted down with tents, bedding, food, cooking stoves, a typewriter, hundreds of reference books, trunks of clothes, a motion-picture camera and the small glass-plate equipment now used by Curtis for his 6½-by-8½-inch cameras. His road load was about a thousand pounds, and his animal team comprised eight horses. In Chinle, perched on the edge of Canyon de Chelly, Curtis met up with the trader Charlie Day, who grew up with the Navajo and was fluent in their language. Day chafed at the way officials from the Indian agency were treating his neighbors. As with the Hopi, Apache and Blackfeet, people in this most populous of Indian nations, living on a reservation about the size of Virginia, were jailed, sometimes without trial, for the crime of practicing native life at its fullest. At the same time, they were encouraged to become dependent on a government that did not have their best interests at heart. Day wrote President Roosevelt to complain. And when Curtis approached him for a second season as translator, Day told Curtis to get written permission before he agreed; he was worried they would be arrested.

  Curtis tried a preemptive move: he used his influence with Francis Leupp, the commissioner of Indian affairs, to arrange letters of transit, sent by telegram. Once these documents arrived, Charlie Day and the Curtis party moved down into the thirty-mile-long Canyon de Chelly for an extensive field session. Day had been appointed by the U.S. Department of the Interior as a guardian of Anasazi treasures, and knew every wrinkle of the canyon. Vandals and thieves were actively chiseling away the centuries of life left behind in the cliffs. The stone apartments cut from the rock, so well preserved by the protective canyon walls, looked as if their inhabitants had gone only days ago.

  Curtis already had much of the material he needed for the Navajo section of Volume I; a picture he had taken of Indians moving through the canyon two years earlier was being hailed as a masterpiece. When John Ford went to Monument Valley some thirty years later to shoot the first of his greatest westerns, he was building on the images Curtis had produced in the Navajo living room: people dwarfed by cloud-piercing rock walls and spires in the open West. On the 1906 trip, Curtis was looking for just enough to fill out the rest of the first book, with Day helping to find subjects. “We made camp in an oasis under cottonwood trees,” Curtis wrote, and then cast about in search of faces that matched the terrain.

  The sky was alive on those summer days. Afternoon temperatures of 105 degrees were broken by electric storms and flash floods, the warm-season monsoons of the Southwest. For the Curtis family of five, together a
t last in common purpose, the hours went by at a pleasant pace. Florence was impressed by her father the cook, who would procure fresh-butchered lamb from the Navajo and grill chops and corn over an open fire. With this meal he usually served squaw bread made by people in the canyon. On days when Justo wasn’t up to it, Curtis would prepare a big feast from scratch for the entire team, including any natives who happened to be around. Their camp was always full of Navajos, the women in rippling skirts and blouses made of velvet, the men with bright scarves and thick, buckskin-soled shoes. “The Indians laughed inside and out,” Curtis said, reflecting the joy he felt. Several hundred people lived full-time in the canyon, tending to gardens watered by freshets from the thunderstorms, while others moved through seasonally, in search of forage for sheep.

  The Curtis children were fascinated by the turquoise jewelry makers, the rug weavers, the sheepherders, the storytellers, the colors and sounds of the canyon, with its sun-burnished walls of stone, the flanks streaked ocher and rust from the mineral-rich water. The girls wore sun hats and frocks; Hal was dressed like a cowboy. They rode mules and horses, collected horned frogs and small lizards, chased jackrabbits. They climbed the cliffs with Charlie Day and their father to get a peek at those haunted stone neighborhoods which had been abandoned eight hundred years earlier, and tried to decipher petroglyphs, some dating back nearly three millennia. In their eyes, the Shadow Catcher was the field general of all human activity in Canyon de Chelly. He worked the audio recording machine, with Myers taking shorthand. Songs, legends, words were catalogued. Curtis spoke enough of the language to force a smile from an old native. As a horseman and a cliff climber, he was a springy athlete. And the things that went on in the heat of the afternoon inside the tent—a makeshift studio—were magical.