by Timothy Egan
After several days, Curtis and Clara loaded Hal into a wagon and rode off to save the boy’s life. Next to the rail tracks, Curtis flagged an eastbound train and brought it to a halt. After negotiations over the fare, a makeshift bed was assembled from two seats. Curtis stayed behind, watching the black smoke of the train shrink as it made its way over the prairie. He heard, more than a week later, that Hal had regained his health in Seattle, though he was still very thin. From then on, no child would be allowed to join the Shadow Catcher in Indian country.
In the fall, the crew of Curtis, Myers, Upshaw and a college assistant settled into a cabin on the Crow reservation. They planned to hole up through the winter, finishing the Custer story for Volume III and working on a separate book on the Crow and the Hidatsa, another northern plains tribe. A blush of gold held to the leaves, a last glimmer of warmth. Then snow flew early, in mid-October, and would last for six months. Winter on the high, lonely Montana plains would soon close in dark and deep, providing ideal conditions for a team of wordsmiths and image makers trying to rewrite history. Their cloister was a shelter of rough-hewn logs, snug against a huge rock embankment, just a half day’s horse ride from the Little Bighorn battlefield. Inside was a large fireplace and kitchen table. They worked from 8 a.m. to just past midnight, as Curtis outlined in a letter to Belle da Costa Greene—“my only interruption being a single trip to the post office, six miles away.” All other activity was restricted. “I permitted mail, but no newspapers were allowed. Every thought and every moment had to be given to the work.”
If the first two volumes of The North American Indian had been pastoral and somewhat painterly, the next two books, on the Sioux and the Crow, would be darker, with more of a documentary look. Curtis felt the burden of a nation’s cherished narrative and the reputation of a man considered “a light to all youth of America,” in Roosevelt’s words. As the Curtis team went through the story cautiously day by day, one side would play prosecutor, the other defender.
“Dear Meany: . . . Has there been anything published on the fact that Custer, from the highest viewpoint of the region, watched Reno’s charge, battle and defeat?”
That was the crux of Curtis’s major finding, and by midfall he felt he was on solid enough ground to start circulating the story. Curtis relied on Meany’s counsel, and his writing and research, to help him through this section. “As far as I have read nothing of this nature has ever been published,” Curtis continued. “It puts an entirely new light on the entire Custer fight.” It did indeed. But the supportive Meany knew that his friend was playing with historical fire, and warned him of the consequences. “This is not a pipe dream on my part,” wrote Curtis. “I have ridden the battlefield from end to end, back and forth from every important point on it, noting carefully the time of such rides.” A month later, he wrote again, asking Meany to find transcripts of the military inquest. He also indicated that he would not be home for Christmas. In another note to the professor, seeking to counter doubts from friends in Seattle and New York, Curtis showed that his confidence had not dimmed:
“If you hear anyone say that I am not to succeed, tell [them] they don’t know me.”
By early January, the Curtis entourage was making great progress and showing few signs of cabin fever. “The work on the Sioux volume has gone like a whirlwind, and consequently happiness reigns among us,” he wrote Meany. The next letter, after a lapse in the professor’s response, was addressed to Mrs. Meany. “If that tall, good-natured husband of yours is still wandering around the face of the earth will you be good enough to drop me a word, and let me know when you expect him home?” Finally, early February: “Our work on the Sioux volume is practically complete.”
Curtis took a break to travel to New York, again to grovel for subscriptions and to update Belle da Costa Greene on what he was doing with her boss’s money. While there, he gave an interview to the New York Herald, offering a preview of his findings. After conducting his exhaustive examination, he had something extraordinary to share: when he published the next volume of The North American Indian, he explained, it would be there for all the world to see.
SAYS CUSTER THREW MEN’S LIVES AWAY
The headline was the least of it. The story reported that Curtis had proof that Custer “had unnecessarily sacrificed the lives of his soldiers to further his personal end,” and that he could have won the battle with little loss of life. “I know it is unpopular to criticize a military commander,” Curtis said, but the Indians who were with him felt that his judgment was flawed. “When the wise old Indian warriors that were in this fight are asked what they think of Custer’s course in the battle, they point to their heads and say, ‘He must have been wrong up here.’”
The article caused a furor. Two officers of the Seventh Cavalry said it was a slander against an American hero and the honor of their fallen comrades. Libbie Custer flew into high dudgeon; she went to work trying to prevent Curtis’s version from ever being published. She leaned on her friends in high places, starting with the president. She battered Gifford Pinchot. How could he do so much to promote this Curtis man, she complained. She demanded that the forester quash the rewrite of the last day of her beloved “Auty.” Though Pinchot was circumspect, he did the widow Custer’s bidding. The newly named Custer National Forest would be unveiled in 1908, and he did not want a controversy hanging over it. He wrote Curtis of his concerns. The photographer promptly replied with an offer to send Pinchot all the material backing his conclusions.
Sensing that the knives of the Custer historical cabal were getting close enough to hurt him, Curtis tried to bring President Roosevelt around to his side. But first he went to the military, sending a sheaf of notes to three longtime army officers and to Charles A. Woodruff, a recently retired brigadier general who had arrived at the Little Bighorn days after the battle. Woodruff agreed to walk the battlefield with Curtis. After spending several days with him, the general urged Curtis to write a complete report and send it to the president. On the officer’s advice Curtis explained his investigative foray for the highest literary critic in the land. “I have ridden with our blood all tingling with the swing of our horses as we galloped across the plains,” he wrote, appealing to the adventurer-historian in Roosevelt. This was the way of the western man of letters—boots muddy, scholarship by walking around. The reply from the White House was written on April 8, 1908:
My Dear Mr. Curtis:
I have read those papers through with great interest, and after reading them, I am uncertain as to what is the best course to advise. I never heard of the three Crow scouts that you mention, and did not know that they were with Custer. I need not say to you that writing over thirty years after an event it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious about relying upon the memory of any man, Indian or white. Such a space of time is a great breeder of myths. Apparently you are inclined to the theory that Custer looked on but a short distance away at the butchery of Reno’s men, and let it take place, hoping to gain great glory for himself afterward. Such a theory is wildly improbable. Of course, human nature is so queer that it is hard to say that anything is impossible, but this theory makes Custer out to be both a traitor and a fool. He would have gained just as much glory by galloping down to snatch victory from defeat after Reno was thoroughly routed . . .
Curtis was crushed. It was the first time the president had let him down. And with each word from Roosevelt, the story that had taken three years to construct lost a stone or two of its foundation, until most of it lay in ruins. Roosevelt was not saying he doubted Curtis’s material. He had no facts to refute what Curtis had found. But logic made it all hard to believe. Wildly improbable. If Curtis was defiant after reading the letter—his usual initial impulse—those two words could not be easily banished from his mind. With his meticulous reconstruction of the battle, Curtis had persuasive evidence to win over the educated cynics, those who never believed that the boy wonder with the camera was mining an untouched vein of valuable history. He felt,
at once, that The North American Indian was deeply wounded, and the doubts about his Custer revisionism might kill it altogether. His careful nurturing of friendships, pacts and deals with the most powerful people in the country, the eastern men who had made his life quest possible, was mortgaged to particular conditions, some of them never written down. Curtis could plow ahead—Roosevelt, Pinchot and all of Libbie Custer’s connections be damned—but that could mean the end of The Cause, as Curtis now called his work. Wildly improbable? Wildly improbable!
“I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts,” Curtis wrote an army colonel who had encouraged his fresh examination of the Little Bighorn. It was three weeks after Roosevelt’s note. A few months later, in a letter to Meany, Curtis indicated that the white flag was flying over the cabin in Montana. “I have been very guarded, and while giving a great deal of new and interesting information, I have said nothing that can be considered a criticism of Custer.” The story of the Crow scouts, the many notes and depositions from White Man Runs Him, the many translations from Upshaw, the detailed and seemingly indisputable narrative helped along by Sioux and Cheyenne who’d participated in the battle, the measured fact-checking by Meany and Myers, the topographic maps and time-of-day placements—all were bundled up and locked away, the scholarship never to find a home between covers of The North American Indian. The story of Custer invading a sovereign nation, the rise and fall of the Sioux—“the limitless Plains theirs to roam”—a buffalo and warrior culture conquered by a ruthlessly superior one, came out in Volume III. Curtis wrote clear and passionate prose, and was often prescient. On Wounded Knee, the last real clash between the worlds, he said, “To the future historian if not to our own, the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee will appear to have been little less than a massacre.” But that was as far as he went. A battlefield map of Little Bighorn was published, showing contour lines. A careful reader could perhaps discern what Curtis had found; almost nobody did until much later. Curtis printed only one of his revelations, though it was certainly not enough to force citizens to look twice at statues of Custer in their town squares:
“Custer made no attack,” he concluded in Volume III, “the whole movement being a retreat.”
On the Custer Lookout, 1908. Curtis went back several times to the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, trying to uncover the true story of the worst loss by the American army in the Indian wars. Here he faces the camera himself, with his native guides. Left to right: Goes Ahead, Hairy Moccasins, White Man Runs Him, Curtis and his aide Alexander Upshaw.
A Heavy Load—Sioux, 1908. Curtis tried to record scenes of the hard life of a winter on the northern plains.
The winter writing retreat in Montana, 1908. Curtis, his cowriter William Myers, Upshaw and others holed up here while putting together the Little Bighorn story. They often debated late into the night.
10. The Most Remarkable Man
1908–1909
FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS, Curtis saw more of Alexander Upshaw and natives of the northern plains than he did of Clara and Seattle. And what he saw in their last months together was a troubled man whose education had opened his eyes to the impossibility of straddling two worlds. Upshaw spent a typical workday helping Curtis re-create a time when the Crow had their own religion, dress and economy, when nobody called them inferior or immoral. And then he went home at night to a family on a reservation where nearly everything from that past was being scrubbed from the land. Through the seasons, Upshaw was with Curtis on horseback under a searing sun, in snowstorms that blotted out the Montana sky, and in a tent at night until the last candle burned out. The translator roamed all over Indian country with his boss, and had ideas on narrative, picture themes and the many qualities of Apsaroke women. Curtis called him “my great and loyal friend.” Upshaw returned the compliment: the Shadow Catcher, he said, was “a fine man.” Curtis paid him $100 a month—that is, when he paid him at all—far more than any of the hundreds of other Indians he’d employed over the years.
Upshaw was not only an interpreter without equal, but a strategist, helping to design an approach to a given tribe, and a sounding board, not afraid to argue with Curtis. When Upshaw left the winter writing cabin for a one-week translating job before a grand jury, the entire operation nearly came to a halt, Curtis noted. He continued to cut his hair short and dress in the clothes of the conquerors—the discipline of trying to “be a man.” But this warrior’s son seldom got much respect for his effort. The Indian inspector Dalby, who had told Upshaw he would not back his attempt to get his white wife adopted by the Crow, monitored his behavior as if he were on parole. Dalby’s admonitions burned inside him.
“I have read your letter through so often that I can repeat every word of it,” Upshaw wrote Dalby. “As to my future, I have given you my sincere words when I promised I will be a man.”
A man? He couldn’t go into Billings, a proper citizen window-shopping with his wife and three children, without somebody sneering or shouting out at him. A man? He had just helped to lead a highly successful scholarly expedition; he had been crucial to the reconstruction of the Battle of the Little Bighorn; he had annotated and explicated the story of his people; and yet he was still a red monkey in a white man’s shoes. Once, he boarded a local train in Montana with Meany. The two men had just taken their seats at the end of a long day when a cattleman, sitting nearby, started in on Upshaw. He didn’t like Indians, he said loudly, and he didn’t like Upshaw sitting there. He wanted him off the train. It wasn’t anything Upshaw hadn’t heard before, but usually he got it for being with his white wife. Meany stood, towering over the cowboy, and said Upshaw wasn’t going anywhere. At six foot four, with a wild thatch of red hair, the professor could intimidate when he had to. The cowboy backed away. “I don’t think I got the worse of the bout,” Meany wrote Curtis, “and I was glad to defend my Crow friend.”
Upshaw’s father, Crazy Pend d’Oreille, was known for bravery against the Sioux, and it was because of his family’s status that young Upshaw was plucked from Montana and sent to the Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania for nine years. The institution’s mission was to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Upon graduation from Carlisle, Upshaw tried to fit the mold of a remade native. When rumors went out that Upshaw, while visiting a western exhibition in Omaha, had taken part in a staged battle and was dressed in tribal costume, he wrote a sharp rebuttal in the Indian Helper, the school paper. In fact, he’d been in suit and tie, his hair short, he insisted. “Alex would have his schoolmates know that he is trying to be a man, though in the midst of trials and tribulations.” Upshaw also tried to be an evangelical Christian, and to organize a YMCA chapter at the Indian school where he taught in Nebraska. But he didn’t last long at either effort.
With Upshaw as cultural guide, Curtis went deep into Apsaroke society. “Through him I am getting into the heart of the Northern Plains Indian in a way that gives me the greatest satisfaction,” he wrote Hodge. It showed in Volume IV, which became a much-cited and consistently praised work of firsthand ethnology. Indeed, Hodge, who spoke from authority, said the Crow volume “is the best story of Plains Indian life ever written.” The people were described as physically robust—a woman could fell a horse with her fist—healthy and confident. Their strength came in part from fighting other Indians; they had enemies to the north in the Blackfeet, enemies to the east in the Sioux, and enemies to the south in the Cheyenne. They roamed an area equal in size to New England. With the bounty from the plains keeping them fed, they had time to spend on decorative arts. “The nature of their life gave the Apsaroke a great deal of comparative leisure,” Curtis wrote, “and they delighted in fashioning fine garments from skins and embroidering them in striking colors.”
A young man trolling for women would ride on horseback nearly naked through a village, singing, “I am merely staying on earth for a time; all women look upon me!” Along with the words to that song, Curtis included the music, publishing a sheet with
the notes. Sex was celebrated. So, while Dalby said in 1908 that the Crow were “devoid of any moral sense in connection with their sexual relations,” Curtis came away with the opposite impression, writing at the same time. They are “certainly an unusually sensual people,” he explained in Volume IV, but that did not mean they are “lax in morals.” And in such digressions, a reader could almost hear Upshaw whispering in the ear of the author: consider, Curtis told his readers, that an Indian may find many customs in American society that are “highly objectionable and immoral.”
What fascinated Curtis about Upshaw, friend and subject, was his duality. It also worried him. He could see the strain in a face turning harder by the day. As early as 1905, Curtis could sense that inner conflict was gnawing away at Upshaw. Curtis doubted that a “coat of educational whitewash,” as he called the years at Carlisle, would be enough to cover the Indian in him. Not long after becoming Upshaw’s friend, Curtis predicted that he would “die and go to the god of his fathers.” Upshaw drank, though alcohol was outlawed on the reservation. He pushed back when a white man struck him, though such a reaction could bring a felony assault charge. He was not submissive. He used words that his neighbors had never heard—English words. “In some respects, he is the most remarkable man I ever saw,” Curtis said in one interview. “He is perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized.” In that sense, Upshaw was the embodiment of a first-rate mind, defined later in the century by F. Scott Fitzgerald—a man who could hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still be able to function. Upshaw did it one better: he lived two opposing lives.
