by Timothy Egan
With Upshaw’s words rattling around his head, Curtis tried to find a middle ground. Privately, his thoughts were moving toward those of his Crow crew member. “As to his being a savage: if we are to take the general definition of the word, there were no savages in North America at the time Columbus landed, as they all had a religion, notwithstanding statements to the contrary by the early explorers and priests,” he wrote in a note from the field for the Morgan archives. In the published book of Volume I, he editorialized in places, despite his promise not to revisit the many indignities. “With advancing civilization,” Curtis wrote of the Apache, “they seem to have gathered all the evils of our life and taken little of the good.” By contrast, the Navajo “have been the least affected by civilizing influences,” he said in a tone that was clearly celebratory. “The Navajo is the American Bedouin, the chief human touch in the great plateau-desert region of our Southwest, acknowledging no superior, paying allegiance to no king in name of chief, a keeper of flocks and herds who asks nothing of the Government but to be unmolested in his pastoral life and the religion of his forebears.”
He scorned government agents for trying to force the mountainous Apache to become farmers, an absurd proposition in a harsh land. “No tribe is more capable of living on natural products.” And he did use both “primitive” and “savage,” though with the first word it was almost always as a compliment, and the second was employed to describe bounty hunters paid by the Mexican government to lift Apache scalps—women’s and children’s included. In the end, the book was mostly practical and matter-of-fact. For instance, he gave a recipe for how to make strong beer from mescal, the Apache way.
Curtis decamped to New York, to the Hotel Belmont, just across the street from Grand Central Terminal, for the final publishing push in June of 1907. “I have the material for the first two volumes practically in shape and will be able to turn it over to the printers in the near future,” he wrote Morgan. The financier was still in Europe, buying art and precious objects with his latest mistress, as a crumbling stock market prompted urgent cables for his return to New York. In Italy, he was a walking bank. Even in the shrine city of Assisi, Franciscan monks who had taken a vow of poverty tried to entice Morgan to share some of his fortune on their behalf. He bought an autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s last violin sonata (No. 10 in G Major), and focused his freight-train gaze on a number of Botticelli paintings.
In Morgan’s absence, young Belle da Costa Greene handled correspondence and controlled acquisitions for the library. She had moved her office to the new marble and limestone palace, and with her active social life was a frequent subject of gossip in the papers. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it really must be grudgingly admitted that I am the most interesting person in New York,” she wrote, “for it’s all they seem to talk about.” Pleaders from all levels of the arts world made frequent calls. Curtis saw Greene in New York, and though he may have been as intoxicated as anyone in her presence, his correspondence with her in 1907 was all business. As per their agreement, he presented Miss Greene with the master prints and promised twenty-five copies of the first volume at year’s end.
With the evanescent Belle Greene, with Harriman and his crowd in Manhattan, with Roosevelt and Pinchot in Washington, with the gentlemen of the National Geographic Society and others who put on black ties and silk gowns to look at lantern slides of Indians in buckskin, Edward Curtis was a man without a breath of doubt—the tall, reservation-trotting, horse-whispering westerner in his Abercrombie and Fitch. But to his few close friends, Curtis was a different man, still not completely free of the homesteader’s shack and the humility of foraging to make a living. He distrusted scholars in particular, and it seemed as if everyone he encountered in academia knew he was a grade school dropout. The exception was Professor Meany, who shared all of Curtis’s enthusiasms and none of his insecurities. At a moment just before publication, when Curtis should have been at his most confident, he told Meany he wondered if he was up to this task and expressed fear, again, of ending up in debtor’s hell. The biggest educational institution in the Northwest, the University of Washington, continued to balk at buying a subscription for the work of its native son. The same was true of a handful of Seattle barons, men who had made themselves wealthy in the early-century boom of one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.
“Of late I have had little but swats from my home town and feel in a most disagreeable mood,” Curtis wrote Meany in a lengthy, multipage rant. “Most of those who say good things about the work would if I owed them two and a half and could not pay on the dot kick my ass and say, ‘Get to hell out of this.’ Yes, I will try to cheer up a bit, but when I think of some of the Seattle bunch I go mad. I am an unknown man trying by sheer bulldog tenacity to carry through a thing so large that no one else cared to tackle it.” Meany again assured him that time would be his ally—the ages would remember him, even if the wealthy of his hometown would not. “The newly rich of Seattle,” Meany wrote Curtis, “are foolish enough to neglect the chance of aiding one of the greatest literary achievements of the century.” His advice was to ignore them, to get back into the field as soon as possible, to “just run along and play.”
But before he could play, he had to sell at least a handful of subscriptions. In Chicago, he visited Edward Ayers, a man of means and a founder of the city’s prestigious Field Museum. Ayers considered himself an expert on Indians and also was the main benefactor of the museum’s library—not a good combination, in Curtis’s experience. The North American Indian should have been a natural acquisition for him. But Ayers turned up his nose at the photographer. He doubted that Curtis could break any new ground with the text; perhaps the pictures would be diverting. And, as Curtis had heard many a time, he’d bitten off more than he could chew. Ayers “thinks I have attempted too big a task for one man, saying, ‘It looks to me as though you were trying to do 50 men’s work,’” Curtis wrote Hodge. He hoped his editor could use his influence among the small circle of museum executives to nudge the Chicago man along. Ayers was unconvinced. “After 30 years in studying this question, and the mass of literature I have read on the subject, I am still in doubt about the value of the historical part of your work,” he wrote.
Besides that doubt, Ayers had to be concerned about the chilling effects of the Panic of 1907. In the fall, the country appeared on the verge of collapse. Roosevelt was perplexed. The markets continued to plummet. A global credit shortage added to the deep freeze. Morgan steamed home, his latest acquisitions in steerage. He summoned the richest men in the nation, Rockefellers, Fricks and Guggenheims among them, to his library for a summit on how to save capitalism. Under the eyes of Renaissance portraits, and facing Morgan’s mottled nose, the choreographers of great capital listened to his plan. In order to stop the Bankers’ Panic they had to stall the run on banks. He threatened to go after brokers who short-sold stock, trying to drive down prices for later purchase. He pledged to use his own money to shore up the banking system, urging others to follow suit. When they did so, after a nervous few weeks, confidence slowly returned to the markets. Morgan, performing the role that the Federal Reserve would play later, had saved the system, for now.
In the depths of the crisis, Curtis prepared to see his benefactor and present him with a collection he hoped would rival anything Morgan dragged home from Europe. With Myers and Phillips wandering over fresh territory in the West, the business end of the Curtis project moved into the “publication office” of The North American Indian in New York. There, Curtis spent many a night in rumpled clothes, at times falling asleep after a long tussle over his finances and the direction of his life work. He wrote to Morgan that he’d been through quite a bit of “blood sweating” bringing the first two volumes to the finish line, “but I’m glad to say, no delay.” He outlined the work ahead with the Sioux and beyond, and reiterated his gratitude. The fact that Morgan could bother with Indian pictures when the global financial system and a big part of the Morgan e
mpire were on the verge of ruin was not lost on Curtis. “I hesitate in troubling you with even the briefest letter in hours like these when you seem to have the burden of the whole land to carry. And let me say what millions know and would like to clasp your hand and say to you: you have saved the country when no one else could.” Whether Belle da Costa Greene passed the note on to Morgan is not clear. He said nothing in reply.
Curtis was used to getting good press. But when two volumes printed on handmade Dutch etching stock called Van Gelder and a thin Japanese vellum—one of 161 pages, 79 photogravure plates and a portfolio of 39 separate plates, the other of 142 pages, 75 plates and 35 of the supplemental pictures—at last came to light in late 1907 and early 1908, the acclaim was seismic. In appearance and texture, the books were among the most luxurious ever printed. The images were done in sepia tones, from acid-etched copper plates produced by John Andrew & Son in Boston and printed by Cambridge University Press. Critics hailed a genius who made publishing history. His pictures were better than fine oil paintings. His text would be used for hundreds of years to come—a literary, artistic, historical masterpiece.
“Nothing just like it has ever before been attempted for any people,” said the New York Times. “He has made text and pictures interpret each other, and both together present a more vivid, faithful and comprehensive view of the North American Indian as he is to-day than has ever been made before or can possibly be made again . . . In artistic value the photogravures are worthy of very great praise. They are beautiful reproductions of photographs that in themselves are works of art . . . And when it all is finished it will be a monumental work, marvelous for the unstinted care and labor and pains that have gone into the making, remarkable for the beauty of its final embodiment, and highly important because of its historical and ethnographic value.”
A rival paper went further. “The most gigantic undertaking since the making of the King James edition of the Bible,” said the New York Herald. “The real, savage Indian is fast disappearing or becoming metamorphosed into a mere ordinary, uninteresting imitation of the white man. It is probably safe to say that Mr. Curtis knows more about the real Indians than any other white man.” And overseas, where that Bible had been recast, came similar waves of praise. The first two volumes “are among the finest specimens of the printer’s art in the world,” wrote the head of the Guildhall Library in London, which had purchased set number 7. “One special reason why the photographs will be more appreciated in England perhaps than America is because The North American Indian is more of a novelty to us.”
Curtis was put on the same pedestal as John James Audubon and George Catlin. “We do not recall any enterprise of a literary sort ever undertaken in America that can compare for splendor of typography and for historical value with that which is just now undertaken by Mr. Edward S. Curtis,” wrote the Independent, an American paper. “For contents, the work recalls no other similar enterprise but Audubon’s monumental ‘Birds of America.’”
From Chicago, where Curtis had struck out with the founder of the Field Museum, more kudos rolled his way. “It is the most wonderful publishing enterprise ever undertaken in America,” wrote Unity Magazine. “If it ever comes our turn to vacate the continent, may we have as able an interpreter and as kindly and skillful an artist to preserve us for the great future.”
In this case, superlative reviews meant nothing to the average reader, since the book was not for sale. It could not be found in any store, and could be seen in only a handful of libraries, by appointment. Morgan was sitting on twenty-five copies, a plurality of the original printing, for Curtis had failed to get anywhere near the number of subscriptions he needed. Curtis made sure that Belle da Costa Greene and President Roosevelt saw the notices. And in his letter to Hodge about the raves, he apologized that he wouldn’t be able to pay him, not just yet, the money he owed for editing. Perhaps the reviews would help with a few reluctant institutions. In any event, Curtis had had his fill of the East Coast. His mind was in Montana, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, there for the Indian side, yet to be told in full, a story that might destroy the reputation of an American hero.
Vanishing Race—Navajo, 1904. Curtis chose this scene as the curtain raiser for his twenty volumes of portfolios—“a touching, melancholy poem,” he called it. It established the theme for his work, which the New York Herald called “the most gigantic undertaking since the making of the King James edition of the Bible.”
Geronimo—Apache, 1905. A few days before Roosevelt was inaugurated, Curtis caught the hard glare of the seventy-six-year-old leader of the Apache, who’d been invited to the White House for the grand ceremony launching T.R.’s second term.
Cañon de Chelly, 1904. In the heart of the Navajo Nation, where stone and sky dwarf humans on horseback, the canyon is one of the most stunning places on earth.
9. The Custer Conundrum
1907–1908
HOT SUN ON BROWN grass in a swollen corner of Montana: Curtis walked the graveyard yet again, site of the worst military loss by American soldiers in the West. He had been over the killing ground dozens of times, had asked the Crow scouts who’d been with George Armstrong Custer the same questions repeatedly, in only slightly different ways. The Indians begged off—they were tired of talking about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, recalling men who cried for their mothers, naked white-bellied bodies floating in the river, puddles of blood and gnarled sinew staining the dirt. How many times did they have to show the place—yes, yes, this is where Custer stood!—and swear it was the very spot where the commander of the Seventh Cavalry had taken his last breath? How many times would they have to summon those images of slaughter in the shadeless hills? The land drained by the Little Bighorn, with its grassy rise to the horizon, its river-sculpted fresh bottomland, its clusters of lodgepole pine and cottonwood, was not hard to like. In the winter, snowdrifts piled high against granite slabs where men had fallen; in the summer, wild floral heads nodded in afternoon breezes. But after the events of June 25, 1876, the ground could never again be just another fold of western land that might boost a spirit at sunset. Too many ghosts floated around, their final casting in the hereafter yet to be sorted.
An examiner of forensics and long-buried facts, Curtis was midway through a third year of working this historical autopsy. Journeys to the Zuni and Acoma, to the Hopi and Apache, to the Pima and Mojave—he had undertaken them over the same years. But throughout that period, no question troubled Curtis more than this one. What really happened on that afternoon in 1876? Some wondered why he would devote so much time to a single battle. But the stated purpose of The North American Indian was to “form a comprehensive and permanent record” of the “customs and traditions” of native people, and few traditions among the Sioux were more important than violent conflict. And after four centuries of Indian wars—lethal clashes over ownership of a continent—the Battle of the Little Bighorn was the beginning of the end, to be followed a year later by the pathos of the Nez Perce’s flight and then the last roundup of Comanche, Cheyenne and Apache stragglers.
In the summer of 1907, Curtis noticed some things and overlooked others. “The bleached bones of troop horses and pack mules” stood out, he wrote in his notebook, and made him wonder who rode those army animals, their ribs now whitened in the July sun. How had they fallen?
Curtis had with him three eyewitnesses—Hairy Moccasins, Goes Ahead and White Man Runs Him—superb sources, courtesy of the tireless work of Alexander Upshaw. All three were Crow natives, also known as Apsaroke, of late middle age, who had been with the commander of the Seventh Cavalry up until the final hour of his life. Custer’s company was annihilated, of course. The Seventh lost 258 men. The three Crow guides and another Indian scout, Curley, had fled and lived. It was White Man Runs Him who was the first to reach another army column with the breathless report that Custer’s force had been “wiped out.”
Well into the early twentieth century, the popular story of Custer was much the sa
me one that went out over telegraph lines not long after his mutilated body was found. The timing of Custer’s death—the height of America’s centennial celebration—would not allow for nuance in the national narrative. He was the commander, all of thirty-six, who stood his ground against impossible odds, a legend while alive, a hero in death. This was the story boys read in school and acted out in the summer woods, one playing Custer to the other kid’s Crazy Horse. This was the Last Stand invoked by politicians on the Fourth of July. A biography—with Custer doomed and fearless, and Major Marcus Reno, the commander of a routed side detachment, drunken and cowardly—matched the press coverage. This version was popularized by the Wild West Show of the peripatetic promoter Bill Cody. He milked it in outdoor performances around the world, complete with an “authentic” reenactment of the battle: circus Indians whooping over mismatched boys in blue. The last and most influential line of the legacy’s defense was Custer’s wife, the formidable Libbie, who guarded her husband’s name like a wizened hawk sitting on a time-frozen nest. It was Libbie who first nagged the army into moving her husband’s body from Montana dirt to an honored grave at West Point, and she who used a web of influential friends to silence anyone who dared depart from the story of his death. Yes, there had been a formal military inquiry, witnesses called, field notes reviewed. The main issue—how could a commander so misjudge the size of the enemy, thus inadvertently leading his soldiers to slaughter—was kicked around but never resolved. Custer’s reputation was intact.
