by Timothy Egan
It had been while walking the Custer battleground in 1905, following in the steps of those who took scalps and those who gave up scalps, that Curtis kept hearing of a man, Alexander Upshaw, who had a strange hold on people in the region. A full-blooded Crow, Upshaw was educated at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the rough finishing institution for natives and the place where Curtis had first met Geronimo. After his graduation in 1897, Upshaw was hired as a schoolteacher at the Indian school in Genoa, Nebraska, but did not feel comfortable as a man of two worlds. Thereafter, he never stayed long in a job; by his thirtieth birthday he was back among his people on the Crow reservation in Montana, working uneven hours as a surveyor, translator, rancher and tribal advocate.
The whites called him “lazy, dishonest, meddlesome, here today and there tomorrow, a regular coyote,” as the Curtis aide Phillips remembered. They didn’t like Upshaw because he spoke well, could argue the law and was a frequent witness in court cases where the Crow were fending off speculators buying big pieces of Indian land in questionable deals. Curtis and Phillips spent more than a week looking for him in that first year among the people of the northern plains, hearing stories of “Upshaw the Terrible” and “Upshaw the Renegade.” When at last they found Upshaw the Available, they put him on the payroll. As Curtis prepared for the 1907 field season, he assigned Upshaw to crack the Custer story, ordering him to get at what really happened, no matter how it might conflict with the iconic version. At about the same time, Professor Meany, who’d studied and written about Sioux history, agreed to come aboard for that part of the project. Meany’s other task, hustling a subscription or two in Seattle, had not gone well. He was embarrassed to report to Curtis that his school, the University of Washington, had yet to commit itself to a full set. But not to worry, Meany assured him, his brilliance would soon be known to all. Curtis remained troubled: American appraisals always came with dollar signs. He would be a nobody if he went broke.
“It matters not how much good work I might do,” Curtis replied. “If I were out of money I would be cursed for a fool and kicked from every door.” Even the one family member who worked with him daily, the worshipful Phillips, had his doubts that Curtis could do twenty volumes in five years, or ten, and still cover his bills.
“You are insanely optimistic!” Phillips told his boss in a fit of voice-elevated candor.
The nation’s attic, the Smithsonian, dealt another setback. Undeterred by the previous rejection, Curtis had pressed a well-connected intermediary into asking yet again for the stamp of the institution on the immense cataloguing and photographing of the country’s first people. For a second time, the Smithsonian authorities said no, and now they threw water on the scope of his work. “It appears that Mr. Curtis’s original idea has become very much expanded,” wrote the secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Walcott. “As you are well aware, it will not do to claim too much for such a publication; otherwise it will get the general condemnation of all interested in the subject.” Curtis got the message: think small. Brown University, one of the prestige colleges that Curtis had hoped would buy a full subscription, also snubbed him, after the school’s resident Indian authority opposed the library’s acquisition. The expert, it seems, had never heard of Curtis. They would regret it, Curtis vowed. “By the time I get through with the Southwest country I will have so much to say that no library can refuse us,” he wrote Hodge.
What lifted Curtis’s spirits and gave him a tailwind of confidence that lasted many months was an endorsement from a much higher source: the president of the United States, no slouch among scholars. His foreword to The North American Indian had arrived months before the unofficial deadline. The words from the White House matched the image Curtis had of himself—produced without coaching or cajoling. Roosevelt got it. And Roosevelt got Curtis.
The president was not much of a stylist, despite having published nearly twenty books by his fortieth birthday. He repeated words and phrases, a habit used in speechmaking that often found its way into writings that called for more subtlety. And, as he frequently contributed to journals, he could be thick with the insider jargon. The foreword, a spare 350 words or so, was none of that:
In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful. All serious students are to be congratulated because he is putting his work in permanent form; for our generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis has done. The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life has been lived under conditions through which our own race passed so many ages ago that not a vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions were not kept. No one man alone could preserve such a record in complete form. Others have worked in the past, and are working in the present, to preserve parts of the record; but Mr. Curtis, because of the singular combination of his qualities with which he has been blest, and because of his extraordinary success in making and using his opportunities, has been able to do what no other man has ever done; what, as far as we can see, no other man could do. He is an artist who works out of doors and not in the closet. He is a close observer, whose qualities of mind and body fit him to make his observations out in the field, surrounded by the wild life he commemorates. He has lived on intimate terms with many different tribes of the mountains and the plains. He knows them as they hunt, as they travel, as they go about their various avocations on the march and in the camp. He knows their medicine men and their sorcerers, their chiefs and warriors, their young men and maidens. He has not only seen their vigorous outward existence, but has caught glimpses, such as few white men ever catch, into that strange spiritual and mental life of theirs; from whose innermost recesses all white men are forever barred. Mr. Curtis in publishing this book is rendering a real and great service; a service not only to our own people, but to the world of scholarship everywhere.
Some would quibble with, even condemn, the cultural superiority inherent in Roosevelt’s take: the poor Indians, living as whites once did during a long-ago primitive age, are passing away, and as they go, they remain unknowable, with “that strange spiritual and mental life of theirs.” But for an understanding of the value of the work, the foreword could not have been better had Curtis written it himself. The president had called him an artist, an outdoorsman, a visionary; he hailed the scholarly depth—take that, you bastards at the Smithsonian and Brown!—and its significance to a nation that was in the habit of erasing its past.
The picture-making, just like the picture-taking, left something to chance. In his studio, working with the fast-fingered Adolph Muhr, Curtis would throw together a brew of developing chemicals in the same way that a winemaker would blend different grapes to bring out tannins and flavors. Deep in a day, he often lost track of what parts had gone into a particular blend. “I have almost forgotten that they are an essential part of photography,” he told a college class. “For every negative that is a disappointment, there is one that is a joy.” He refined an image, trying to bring more light or shade, to frame smaller or larger, to blur a certain face or show its every crag, to burn a halo effect behind a head or darken a background. In Seattle, they toned, printed, engraved, “night after night until the last cable car jangled its call as it slid down the hill to its terminus,” said Phillips. Muhr was no rubber stamp, but he was in thrall to the work, and brought others in to make it even better. He hired a woman just out of the University of Washington, Imogen Cunningham, and she wasted no time testing the limits of this emerging art form. In college she had majored in chemistry, then traveled to Germany to study photography. Cunningham, like Curtis, loved to dare and shock; she had taken photographs of nude subjects at Mount Rainier, and explored dream states and subconscious themes in her prints. She saw in Curtis someone on par with the mighty Stieglitz, who had formed the Photo-Secession group to promote the artistic me
rits of photography. Stieglitz and his followers used darkroom techniques to soften a subject, or blur an image in a reach for abstraction. Curtis had been doing that since he started his studio work, and his lens was often little more than an opaque veil. Many a viewer perceived painterly metaphors and objects freighted with symbolism. “And the photographs themselves, quite apart from their historic and scientific value, show a fresh, far step in the progress of photography into the realm of fine arts,” wrote a reviewer in the Craftsman. “Mr. Curtis has so far improved on old methods of printing and finishing as to have practically invented processes in photographic presentation. His tones, his rough surfaced papers, his color combinations are a new art, or a new science.” Curtis dismissed talk from the avant-garde with his oft-stated goal: he wanted people to see human beings in the faces of Indians, and he wanted those faces to live forever.
The first pictures selected for The North American Indian implied that the only way Indians would find eternal life was through a Curtis lens. Of course, this would boost the value of his pictures—wishful thinking with a profit motive. In the studio, looking for the picture that was emblematic of his theme, Curtis returned to an image he had taken while wandering in Canyon de Chelly in 1904. Then, he had shot several ground-level stills of a few natives on horseback moving away from the camera—a retreat, with one person looking back, as in a last glance at a homeland. Curtis had deliberately underexposed it in the field, to give it a bit of a gauzy blur. But back in Seattle, making the print for Volume I, he wasn’t satisfied with the light. He and Muhr stayed up all night experimenting with exposures and tones, using different chemical batches. One was too dark. The other too refined. One looked phony, polished. The other too removed. One had too much detail, the frame cluttered. Another was too gauzy. Curtis wanted a sprinkling of sunlight coming off the backs of people as they moved away, but not show so much that it might draw the eye away from the main image. The Indians traveled toward a mesa, or a mountain range; it was too dark to make it out, distant and blurred. By dawn’s break, the heavy lifting in the studio was over: Vanishing Race would be the curtain raiser in the separate portfolio of photogravures that accompanied the bound text and pictures of Volume I. Curtis offered this caption: “The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future.” In a letter to a friend in Seattle, he called it “a touching melancholy poem.”
The second picture chosen for the portfolio was the side-view profile of Geronimo, which countered the soft-focus valedictory of Vanishing Race with defiance. It was meant to be a taunting eulogy, not unlike Chief Seattle’s imagined words, “Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.” And Geronimo’s portrait validated the self-image of Americans who had pressed farms, villages and great iron cities into pastoral pockets of the former Indian homeland: the decline of one people was inevitable, no matter how many virtues were being discovered on the deathbed.
Within the smooth-textured leather binding of Volume I were pictures that were less gloomy, though still intended to trouble the mind. Curtis opened with The Pool—Apache, a visual complement to his words defining people through nature. A nearly naked man, hair falling well below his shoulders, stands barefoot on rocks at the edge of a calm river. The water is a mirror, and the countryside is lush. The Apache man appears to be deep in thought. Throughout the rest of the book, water is a repeat motif. Curtis fought with Hodge over whether to include several nudes, which he believed could best illustrate tribal myths, dreams and stories. Curtis insisted that the way to explain a part of the Indian inner world was “to make the most of the nudes.” But Hodge, perhaps fearing a censorious reaction from buttoned-down colleagues, prevailed: in the end, only partial nudes were included.
The facial close-ups, with Curtis the portrait photographer at the top of his game, are less affected, and in an odd way more natural and journalistic, from the infant with bright cheeks, An Apache Babe, to Escadi, an Apache headman. His portrait of Alchise, bare-chested and leaning against a tree, shows a fifty-five-year-old man who has lived many lives. In the long shots, the land dwarfs the humans. A Hilltop Camp—Jicarilla provides a sense of what it’s like to reside on a bluff when a mountain storm approaches. But it is with the pictures of the Navajo that the oversized rock backdrops play a starring role. Cañon de Chelly and Cañon del Muerto are mash-ups of sky, sandstone and mountain flanks, predating Ansel Adams with their shadow work and textural detail. Sunset in Navajo-Land is a black-and-white composition put to dramatic effect without being too precious. Women of the Desert makes everyday heroes of the Navajo mothers who tend flocks of sheep over stubby land that dares people to scratch a living from it. Other Navajos are fully masked, the camera catching the contrast between muscled torso and wildlife-animated facial hoods. The religious rituals that Curtis was so proud of capturing are presented like trophies: the Apache Medicine Man leans over what appears to be the sacred buckskin creation chart, and Yeibichai Sweat is the precursor to the Navajo ceremony that the men of the Smithsonian said could never be photographed.
Curtis wrote the text as if he had just returned from a visit to Homer’s Greece, attempting to explain nations and their mythic stories, complete with a translation guide to languages not taught in American schools. As with the ancient Greeks and Romans, he wrote, the Indians have “a deity for every occasion and hour.” He divided the book into sections on tribal history, home life, mythology and interpretations of certain ceremonies. He didn’t just summarize a particular myth of, say, the origin of fire, but wrote exhaustive essays on the subjects. The story of Goshonné took up two pages. Marriage between related families was strictly prohibited, he wrote, and “it kept their blood at the very best.” Men who had two wives, a common practice, made sure the women lived far apart from each other. He talked about the Apache sense of humor—pranks, practical jokes, gut-busting laugh sessions. “Surely, he who says the American Indian is morose, stolid and devoid of humor never knew him in the intimacy of his own home.”
The Apache reputation for being “wild” came about largely because they had been nomadic and had developed raiding into an economic skill. He tried to counter the stereotype, again, with an appreciation of their spiritual life: “Nothing could be more logical and beautiful than many of their prayers and songs.”
The various diets were explained, the food ranging from grapes and piñon nuts to deer and chipmunk. So were the Indians’ sex lives and property rights, and the role of women, children and the elderly. Perhaps most astonishing, for a man who by trade was a studio photographer, was his lengthy appendix of the different Athapaskan dialects among the Southwest tribes. With considerable help from Myers, he wrote up a comparative chart showing the English, Apache, Jicarilla and Navajo pronunciations for a given word.
He labored throughout with the meaning of “savage” and “primitive,” words used by even the most sympathetic of early-twentieth-century anthropologists to describe Indians. “There are two sides to the story and in these volumes such questions must be treated with impartiality,” he wrote. In this struggle, Curtis went back and forth with the Crow translator in his crew, Alexander Upshaw, who clearly influenced him. Upshaw was conflicted throughout his life. In a picture at the Carlisle Indian School, he wears a dress shirt and pressed pants, with his hair cut short and parted in the middle, the very image of assimilation. He also wrote an essay for the school newspaper arguing the merits of giving up the old ways and learning to live like a white, titled “What the Indians Owe to the United States Government.” But once he moved back home and went to work for Curtis, Upshaw took up the cause of tribal rights; he seemed to “return to the blanket,” as Phillips described it. He posed without a shirt and in a head bonnet. He fought with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, even when he worked for it.
As Curtis went over his notes one night in Montana, n
ot long after hiring Upshaw, the conversation moved to the idea of an “educated Indian” compared with those who refused schooling. A government agent who sat with them, as federal interlopers often did when trying to keep an eye on Curtis, asked the Crow interpreter why his people didn’t show much of an American work ethic. Upshaw rose, pointing to a row of buffalo skulls lining a cabin shelf.
“They tell you why,” he said. “While those buffaloes were alive we did not need to work. Only niggers and white people farmed. We were a superior people and had nothing but contempt for those who worked.” The government man mumbled something about other tribal members who had successfully taken up the hoe and the merchant’s life. “Do you expect us in the fraction of a lifetime, in the quarter of the age of an old man, to have changed our whole life, and even to have forgotten the days of the old freedom, when we were lords of all the great plains and mountains?” said Upshaw. “In what way does your civilization benefit us? Before you had attempted to force your so-called civilization upon us we had every desire of the heart!” Curtis took Upshaw’s side of the argument, but the translator wasn’t through. “What has your civilization done for us? Robbed us of our land, our strength, our dignity, our content. Even your religion has robbed us of our confidence in the hereafter.”
