by Timothy Egan
Early evening, with the sun’s sting receding at last, Curtis moved his party uphill to a perch of level ground that afforded a broad, sweeping view of the Little Bighorn. He repeated every step in the staging leading up to the battle. “When the troops traveled slow, we did the same,” Curtis wrote. “When they had halted, we halted. When the scouts went ahead, I waited where Custer had for the return of the scouts.” Joining Curtis and the scouts were Upshaw, translating the Indian words, and Hal Curtis, age thirteen and endlessly entertained by the work of his father. Clara had come out to the northern plains as well—another attempt to be a part of her husband’s life in Indian country. She stayed back at the larger camp on the Pine Ridge reservation, the Dakota home of the Rosebud Sioux Nation. Working with the Sioux and some Cheyenne, Curtis had conducted several rounds of interviews with veterans who took part in the fight. From them, he heard that Custer’s eardrums were pierced by women before the blood on his face had dried, because he refused to listen. He was told of the bravery of Crazy Horse, who’d been swimming when the battle started, then had quickly mounted a horse and made several daring charges to split Custer’s men. “Let us kill them all off today,” he said, “that they may not trouble us anymore.” And this rare victory was given the usual cast by the Americans: when Indians won, it was always a massacre.
Curtis had also walked the battlefield with these Indian victors, these still proud Sioux of the western subtribe who called themselves Lakota. He sat where bodies were found, pressing for information about strategy and intent. He recorded many anecdotes, the violent vignettes somewhat altered by time, but he wanted the bigger picture. “They could tell vividly of their actions,” Curtis wrote, “but could give no comprehensive account of the actions as a whole.” Already he had taken many pictures of the participants. He was fond of Red Hawk’s portrait, his eyes full of tragedy, half his face obscured by a droopy war bonnet, and wrote that his “recollection of the fight seemed particularly clear.” Red Hawk appeared to be fond of Curtis too, giving him the Sioux name of Pretty Butte. It was Red Hawk who posed for Curtis atop a white horse drinking water at a stop, the picture titled An Oasis in the Badlands. There, the ninety-one-year-old Red Hawk is shown on his mount with a rifle protruding from a simple saddle—a pose meant to convey that the Sioux still had some fight left in them. What Curtis saw in the Sioux was what rival tribes feared in them: a fine-honed tradition of war makers and buffalo chasers, scary good at bloodletting.
Now Curtis concentrated his work on the other side of the battle, those Indians who had worked for Custer, longtime enemies of the Sioux. The Crow feared the Sioux more than they did the whites. If captured by a Lakota, a Crow knew he would be facing mutilation, burning, eye-gouging and other forms of slow torture. So when Custer and his bluecoats arrived with cannons and rapid-firing guns, the Crow saw a chance for a permanent advantage in the northern plains. If the army could do something about another Crow enemy, the Cheyenne, it would further serve their purposes. The Crow scout White Man Runs Him had led the Curtis party up the Rosebud River, one rise over from the Little Bighorn, following the path where Custer broke from his main command on the Yellowstone. The party walked the easy miles to the divide, one side falling away to the river they had just followed, the other giving way to the bumpy valley of the battle. They dropped down a bit, to a lookout known as the Crow’s Nest. It was here, said the scouts who had led Custer, that they first saw the Indians camped below. Most of them were Sioux under the guidance of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, though they had with them a sizable contingent of Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The Cheyenne had good reason to hate the Americans. Over three hundred years of contact with whites, from their migration out of the upper Mississippi headwaters, to the northern plains, to the eastern Rocky Mountains, the tribe had warred, traded and hunted their way to upward mobility. But then came the Sand Creek Massacre, on November 29, 1864, the most brutal slaughter of Indian innocents by U.S. combatants. A camp of about five hundred Cheyenne, almost all women, children and old people, had made a peace pact and were gathered under an American flag in Colorado when they were attacked by a former Methodist minister, J. M. Chivington, leading a volunteer army of drunks and malcontents. Curtis described what happened in Volume VI:
“. . . practically all were scalped, and that women as well as men were so mutilated as to render description unprintable; that in at least one instance a woman was ripped open and her unborn child thrown by her side; that defenseless women, exposing their breasts to show their sex, and begging for mercy, were shot down with revolvers placed practically against their flesh; that hours after the attack, when there was not a militant Indian within miles of the camp, children were used as targets.”
The Indian scalps were later displayed, to great whistling and applause, at an opera house in Denver. Four years later, Custer wiped out a village of Cheyenne on the Washita River. Approaching the Indians in that encounter, one of Custer’s officers wondered what they would do if they found themselves outnumbered. “All I am afraid of is we won’t find half enough,” said Custer.
There were certainly more than enough Cheyenne and Sioux camped along the Little Bighorn. Women and children, thousands of ponies and hundreds of tipis made the gathering appear a vast, almost festive tent city of smoke, dust and chatter. About 5,000 Indians were in the valley, though the numbers varied in all accounts, and the scouts could not judge the size by what they had seen. Custer’s men numbered 650 soldiers.
A bit closer to the Little Bighorn, Custer broke up his forces into three battalions. The prize was in his grasp; he was not about to let the enemy slip away and bring glory to some other commander in what might be the last battle of the Indian campaigns. One flank, under Major Reno, veered left and south, downward to the river, to cut off any escape. Another remained on higher ground. Custer moved in the general direction of the camp, though he stayed above the river, roughly parallel to it. In early afternoon, Reno ordered his men to battle. They charged into a thicket of small trees and brush, confronting women and children who appeared in a panic. The gunfire roused the warriors, who quickly massed. They swarmed Reno’s men and set fire to the brush, pushing them into defensive positions in the timber. Reno was a brooding man, prone to drink during the day until he passed out at night. He and Custer, a teetotaler, despised each other. As it became apparent to Reno that his men would be routed, he ordered a retreat. His words are not carved in stone at West Point: “All those who wish to make their escape follow me!” It turned into a run-for-your-lives, desperation scramble, but it ultimately saved Reno and many of his men.
That story was not disputed. The military inquiry and several books and magazine accounts had drawn out the details, although the extent of Reno’s alcoholism, and his inebriation on the day of battle, was in question. It was always assumed that Custer knew nothing of Reno’s debacle until it was too late, for he was out of sight. But the three Crow scouts now told Edward Curtis a different story. They stood with the photographer on a patch of ground surrounded by barking prairie dogs. Look below, they said, arms extended—here was an open view of the site of Reno’s full retreat. Curtis estimated he was close enough that it was “almost within hailing distance.” From here, the Crow scouts said, Custer had watched Reno’s company bleed and run. What’s more, Custer dismounted and took in the carnage while sitting on the grass, as if being entertained by blood theater, the Indians claimed. White Man Runs Him said he begged Custer to intercede, scolding him for letting soldiers die. “No,” the commander replied. “Let them fight. There will be plenty of fighting left for us to do.”
That story was new, and potentially explosive. The conventional account had come from the Indian scout Curley, because no one under Custer’s direct command had survived. Curley, then nineteen, had fled a full hour before the battle. But White Man Runs Him, Goes Ahead and Hairy Moccasins had stayed with Custer until just minutes before battle, at which point they were allowed to make a dash for safet
y.
Curtis had brought with him a U.S. Geological Survey map, fresh off the press. He was the first person to use this invaluable topographical aid as a way to understand the sightlines of the combatants. At the viewpoint, White Man Runs Him told how Custer was unmoved by the slaughter of his hated rival Reno. “Custer watched all of this for 45 to 60 minutes,” Curtis wrote in his notes, “and the whole fight was so close to him that he could have been in the thick of it in five minutes.” By this account, Reno was a victim, Custer a coward—and a calculated one at that. “Reno’s effort was truly pathetic, yet to have expected him, unsupported, to successfully meet the Sioux was comparable to presuming to stop the flow of the Niagara by waving a wand,” Curtis wrote in a rough draft. Had Custer charged, at a time when the Indians had yet to fully assemble, the battle might have ended in victory for the Americans, or in a draw.
Custer did eventually make his way toward the river, where, in the usual telling, he was surprised by a mass of charging Indians, and there made his Last Stand. The Little Bighorn was difficult to ford, the story had it, because of steep ground, another reason why Custer couldn’t take the fight directly to the Indian camp. But Curtis found that the riverbank was actually quite level at the place where Custer had tried to cross, not a difficult ford. All of this information astounded Curtis. He told Upshaw to question the scouts hard. Upshaw went over inconsistencies and repeated his queries so many times that it brought ridicule from the Crow scouts. At one point, Curtis held a knife to the sky; he could not make a mistake, he shouted—his life work was on the line! The Indians touched the blade of the knife and looked upward, then into the photographer’s eyes.
“All we have told you is the truth.”
This breakthrough would never have been possible without the fluency and persistence of Upshaw, the Indian who served the Shadow Catcher longer than any other. At night, lying on the ground under the high ceiling of a Montana sky, Upshaw and Phillips would go over the day’s notes, talking at the orchestration of Curtis. They set up several tents among the Indian tipis along the banks of the Little Bighorn. After having breakfast at 7:30, they started work at 8, took a half hour for lunch and an hour for supper, followed by work in the firelight until 1 a.m.—every day. Curtis considered Upshaw an invaluable member of the team, praising him in letters, offering to help with his government problems. But they fought over money. Curtis was late with payments, a pattern that held for nearly everyone who did business with him. He could be imperious. In that year, Curtis’s payroll had expanded to seventeen people at one point, heavy with translators and wranglers, and including a close friend, Ed Meany, who was hired to do research and write part of the Sioux story.
By late July of 1907, Curtis believed he knew more about the Battle of the Little Bighorn than any man alive and was excited to release his findings. At around this time, Upshaw had started drinking, and would disappear during binges. For almost a decade, the Carlisle School had drilled into him the idea that it was wrong to resuscitate stories of the Indian past. The language, war cries, ceremonies, spiritual offerings to earthly elements, the face paint, the chants, the tiers of warrior prestige based on scalping—all must be forgotten, the school taught, if Indians were going to prosper. And now here was Upshaw, working for the world’s foremost project dedicated to the task of preserving those same old ways. Worse, Upshaw could see the corrosive effect on his people of a disaster in federal Indian policy. Following the Dawes Act of 1887, the government tried to break up tribal holdings, giving Indians individual “allotments” of their own land. In theory, this would make them property owners, each family with a piece of ground to call its own, not unlike the philosophy behind the Homestead Act. In practice, however, after twenty years it led to the reservations losing more than half of the land they’d been promised by treaty. The new law was honey for the bears of real estate predation.
Upshaw was married to a white woman from Ohio named Emma, and had three children to support. When he went into town, in Billings, the whites mocked him for his marriage and called Emma a traitor to her race. That summer, Upshaw decided to remain on the Crow reservation and raise his family in a hybrid way. But when he tried to get his wife adopted into the Crow Nation, he ran into trouble with his own people and their government overlords. “I have concluded that it is not wise,” the federal Indian inspector Z. Lewis Dalby wrote Upshaw in late July. Dalby had enormous power over the Crow; he could make arrests, prosecute people and settle land disputes. And he despised them. In his eyes, Crow women were “without virtue,” promiscuous, and the men “abominably immoral.” To Upshaw’s earnest plea for help in bringing his white wife into the tribe, the inspector was blunt. “No white person has ever been adopted into the tribe,” he wrote. “Now, Alex, as you know I have taken a deep personal interest in you and I do want to see you make good . . . You have behaved like a man, and I believe you can see the foolishness as well as the meanness of your former course, and that you now intend to straighten up and be a man. Mr. Curtis is your friend. Talk these things over with him.” In essence, the educated Indian who had praised assimilation was told he shouldn’t practice it.
In August, the Curtis party folded its summer camp along the Little Bighorn and trotted back to Pine Ridge, a two-week journey on horseback. Curtis had nearly wrapped up his investigation of the Custer story. He planned to check a few loose ends with the Sioux and then walk the battlefield one more time in the fall with an army commander. His time with the Sioux, in addition to the Custer story, was paying off with a rich and varied collection of pictures. His camera caught them drying meat, praying to the Great Mystery, assembling at his suggestion to reenact scenes of a war party about to strike. He documented tipi construction, embroidery patterns of deerskin wardrobes and the way young girls were taught to ride horses, lashed to the animals’ backs. The portraits in particular—of Jack Red Cloud, Fast Elk, Crazy Thunder and American Horse—conveyed the kind of inside knowledge that was characteristic of his best work. The harrowing visage of Slow Bull’s wife, her eyes fixed in the caverns of an eroded face, porcupine-quill earrings and necklaces flowing below, a whitewashed sky behind her, could not have been captured by a stranger. Most of the faces, though, look gaunt—and for good reason. When Curtis had first started working with the Sioux, in 1905, they often went hungry. In the old days, an average Sioux would eat about six full buffalo a year. Without these shaggy-headed beasts, they were dependent on handouts. “It is doubtful in the history of the world that any people ever were brought so suddenly to such a radical change in their manner of living,” Curtis wrote in his volume that explained the tribe. “The enforced change in diet alone so undermined them physically that they became an easy prey to every ill.”
When Curtis asked the Sioux if there was anything he could bring them in the future, they answered with a single word: food.
Upon his return, Curtis had found the Sioux worse off, some near starvation because government rations never appeared. Curtis arrived with a beef steer, fulfilling his promise. He had expected a party of twenty. About three hundred showed up, milling around, anxious and hollow-eyed. Negotiations were blunt and quick: the Indians would work for Curtis, explain their customs and recall the warrior traditions, but they had to be fed, and now. The Dakota plains, so full of buffalo during summer days past, were a ghost prairie in 1907—an empty pantry. And at Pine Ridge Curtis saw a stark replay of what had motivated the Sioux to go to war back in 1876. By treaty, they had been promised nearly all of modern South Dakota, and hunting access to twenty-two million acres in eastern Montana and North Dakota. But the treaty lasted no longer than any other, a story Curtis had heard many times. Custer had guarded a railroad survey into Sioux territory in 1873, a clear violation, and then led an expedition to the Black Hills in 1874, the tribe’s sacred ground. When gold was discovered in 1875, Sioux land was overrun by prospectors. President Ulysses S. Grant demanded that the Indians sell the Black Hills to the United States. After they refused to le
t go of their homeland, the Sioux were ordered to cluster themselves at Pine Ridge and await government food. Those who refused were considered to be at war and labeled “hostiles.” That set the stage for the campaign of 1876 and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. A bloody epilogue took place in 1890 at Wounded Knee, where the cold, gaunt Sioux who had started to dream of the old life through the Ghost Dance revival were gunned down by soldiers from the same Seventh Cavalry. Curtis heard that story one day in all its murderous detail while he stared at the mass grave at Wounded Knee, twenty miles from Pine Ridge.
Curtis could not find a buffalo to feed the Sioux if he used every dollar of J. P. Morgan’s money. But with the help of Meany, his team rounded up at least one more beef steer and was able to host a feast late in that summer of 1907. “Their hearts were happy,” Meany wrote. “Old rites were re-enacted, old battles re-fought, old stories re-told; and Mr. Curtis’s pen and camera recorded it all.”
Trouble now came from within the Curtis family. On the ride from Montana to Pine Ridge, Hal had slumped in the saddle and almost fell off; he was not nearly as talkative or observant as he’d been earlier in the summer. At night he appeared listless, without an appetite, his brow warm to the touch. He complained of stomach pain and headaches. Curtis picked up the pace, onward to his main camp at the Sioux reservation, dragging Hal behind a horse in a makeshift carrier. At Pine Ridge, when the party arrived, Clara was horrified at her boy’s appearance. She immediately took charge, setting up a bed for Hal in a tent under the shade of a cottonwood. His fever hovered between 103 and 104. He still could not eat. She said it was typhoid fever, a disease caused by a salmonella bacterium and often picked up from contaminated food or water; it could be fatal. Curtis had taken his boy to many camps that summer, and food or drink from a cowhand or a native helper might have spread the bacteria. Clara sent an Indian to the nearest railroad track, twenty miles away, with instructions to stop a train with an emergency request to get a prescription. After several days, medicine arrived from Chicago. But Hal showed little improvement. His mother fed him prairie chicken soup and applied wet compresses to his forehead. Curtis suspended all operations.
