by Timothy Egan
Curtis was there in search of the once prosperous tribes of the Columbia. For centuries, these natives had only to walk a few steps from their cedar-plank homes to have all they needed to eat. At Celilo, millions of Pacific salmon made the transition from long-haul distance swimmers to high jumpers. They had to leap up the side pools of the falls, a fight with gravity and a down-pounding current. For American Indians, there was no easier way to take protein. They used nets, gaff hooks, spears and baskets to bring home the tastiest species of salmon, the oil-rich Chinook. Some years, upward of ten million fish would pass by.
Celilo Falls hosted a trade mart as well—an open-air exchange in a desert surrounded by snow-hooded volcanoes. Inland tribes arrived with bison skins and elk hides and teeth; coastal dwellers came with jewelry made of surf-polished seashells. Curtis was in his element shooting the Columbia tribes in their element—the Walla Walla, the Umatilla, the Cayuse and various smaller Chinook bands, doing what they had done for centuries. He framed men with thick forearms spearing salmon. He captured teenage boys leaning over platforms, rickety-looking contraptions that hung above the swirling Columbia, scooping fish from white water with their long-handled dip nets. He did not have to stage these scenes, as he did when he asked the Sioux to reassemble a war party, or when he requested that an old chief put on his eagle-feathered bonnet one more time for posterity. But he knew these pictures would soon have historical value. There was talk among the merchants and boosters of the fast-growing communities of the interior Northwest of damming the Columbia, though it seemed preposterous that anything could tame such a torrent.
His task on this spring day was simply to make it down a drop of eighty feet, as the Corps of Discovery had done in 1805, without getting killed. He and his crew hauled the boat out of the water and onto a single flatcar on a rusty length of rail track parallel to the falls. This track led to a cauldron below. The plan was to lower the launch, using ropes to slow its descent, and try to make a soft enough landing in the water that the boat would not be crushed. Waist-deep in the Columbia at the head of Celilo, Curtis barked at his men through the spray.
“The roar of the falls was so great they could not hear my calls for instruction,” he wrote. He waded to shore, shouting out a plan of action. Noggie would have none of it; the cook sat on a rock, head in hands, sobbing.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I know you will drown,” Noggie said. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “I know you will drown!”
Curtis wanted to slap him. He had no time for this crap. His crew had thinned considerably. He couldn’t pay Bill Phillips, now absent. And his cousin-in-law had fallen in love, and showed less interest in The Cause. Upshaw was dead, and God, how he missed him. Bill Myers, who had taken on more of the writing duties in addition to his fieldwork, was still with him, of course. The new hire, Schwinke, the son of German immigrants, was getting his first tryout as a field stenographer. He was just twenty-two and willing to work cheap. Meany was back at the University of Washington, a much-loved professor in his pulpit, dazzling young minds at a school that had grown overnight into a sprawling campus of Gothic towers, limestone monuments and bug-eyed gargoyles staring out toward Mount Rainier. This expansion had come about because the university had been the site of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s coming-out party. Holding a world’s fair at a university that then had only three buildings and was surrounded by an old-growth forest was Meany’s idea. The fair was a success beyond the wildest projections. The Olmsted brothers, the designer sons of the man who drew up New York’s Central Park, had been hired to frame the exposition. By the time the fair ended in October, 3.7 million visitors had come to the nation’s far corner for a look. Curtis had a prominent place at the exposition grounds; the five printed volumes of The North American Indian were given trophy display. This marked the first time that people in Curtis’s hometown could see an extensive layout of what their famous resident had produced.
“You will drown!” Noggie started in again. Curtis forced his will on the crew, and with careful guidance they lowered their boat down the edge of the falls, its sides slapped by water. The skiff crash-landed at track’s end, but remained intact. They were at the point where the river was pinched by high basalt cliffs, squeezing into the narrowest, most powerful hold—a doubling, at least, of hydraulic power. And they had eight more miles to go, though no other section would be as steep as Celilo Falls. Still, Curtis showed no fear, no panic. To be out in the wild again, breathing air that whistled through the Columbia Gorge, was a tonic for a tired forty-two-year-old man. Unbound, he was always in a better mood.
The year had been clouded by problems on many fronts, despite his international celebrity. All winter, Curtis had been cooped up in a new writer’s cabin, across Puget Sound from Seattle, on the Olympic Peninsula, not far from the little piece of ground the Curtis family had homesteaded in 1887. The retreat was near a village called Waterman, and it was aptly named, for it rained, or threatened to rain, nearly every day. Once again the confinement—in this case, low clouds and steady squalls—was ideal.
“We are entirely shut off from the world,” he wrote his editor Hodge. “Our camp is certainly as cheerful as one could wish in this weather, which is the sort well-adapted to ducks.” He refused to let newspapers in, and allowed only one mail delivery a week—the same regimen he’d enforced in Montana. For breaks they took walks in the mist. With Myers fact-checking and assisting with big portions of the writing, Curtis worked that wet winter through all of Volumes VI and VII and the first part of VIII. He was trying to cover a tremendous amount of ground: the Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Arapaho in Volume VI, which closed out the northern plains; the Yakima, Klickitat, Interior Salish and Kutenai in the next volume, taking in many of Washington State’s dry-side Indians; and the Nez Perce, Walla Walla, Umatilla, Cayuse and Chinook, from the Columbia region. Much of this material came from earlier Curtis forays. One of the main writing challenges was how to present the Nez Perce, Chief Joseph’s people. Curtis was especially fond of them, dating to his football weekend in Seattle with the aging tribal leader. He felt bitterness at their treatment. He had pored over the events leading up to the Nez Perce War of 1877, and knew he had as much new to say on this subject as he did on Custer. But he chafed at the restraint of trying to tell a straightforward history, bound by his own published promise in the introduction not to revisit injustices. When he stared at the picture of Chief Joseph—those eyes!—he could feel a bit of the ache from the old man’s heart.
His sentiment had been evident in the section on the Cheyenne, in the draft of Volume VI. Along with the Sioux and the Apache, they were the last nation to be placed on a reservation, and their holdout had clearly won over Curtis. He called the land given to the Northern Cheyenne in southeast Montana “a small and discouragingly sterile reservation” and described their treaty as “a delightful bit of satire.” In that pact, the Indians were allowed to homestead on ground that had once been theirs. In his Return of the Scouts and Before the Final Journey he showed the Cheyenne mounted, at full gallop. For an additional boost of pride, his best portrait from the Cheyenne is a warrior—Two Moons, one of the veterans who defeated Custer. He wrote up sheet music, including “A War Song of the Dog Men,” sung by a special breed of Cheyenne soldiers.
At times, Curtis slipped out of the writers’ roost to work with Muhr in the Seattle studio. His many days with the Piegan and Blackfeet had paid off with a wealth of material for Volume VI. But one picture troubled him. It showed Little Plume and his son Yellow Kidney, with their high foreheads and prominent braids, sitting in a buffalo-skin tipi stuffed with everyday objects. Right between them, on the earthen floor, is a more prosaic accessory—an alarm clock. How had Curtis missed this? He agonized. It was a revealing photo, as he said in his caption later, “full of suggestions of the various Indian activities.” But could those activities include a device for getting up early, perhaps for a tedious job some
where? He had Muhr retouch the photo, removing the alarm clock—one of the most significant of his manipulations of a picture. Happy with the finished product, Curtis returned to the writing camp.
At the cabin, Curtis was closer, geographically, than he’d been to Clara for some time, barely twenty miles across the sound. But the two were more emotionally distant than ever before. Their only son had recovered from the typhoid fever that nearly killed him, but the family was shattered. Hal went east, to a boarding school in Connecticut, courtesy of a wealthy Curtis benefactor. “I never came home because there wasn’t really a home after that,” he said later. Clara had started to withdraw from the family, perhaps as protection for her own pain, and spent more and more of her free time with Nellie, her sister and confidante. At the age of thirty-five, Clara had given birth to a daughter—their fourth child, Katherine—on July 28, 1909. The baby was the last trace of intimacy between Edward and Clara. By 1910, their marriage was a sham, irrevocably broken, though no divorce proceedings were started. Clara kept the house, with sole parenting duties over the three children at home, and still managed the studio.
Curtis moved into the Rainier Club, in its fancy new downtown digs on Fourth Avenue—a Kirtland Cutter design inspired by Jacobean manor houses of England. Thereafter, he listed the club as his home address. It was the finest dining and gentlemen’s parlor in the city, but it was not free. Curtis was broke, as usual. So the club made a deal: he could stay there, in a small room upstairs, with full privileges, but would have to work for his keep. How so? Pictures, what else? And so the most famous portrait photographer in America entered a long period of indentured servitude to the Rainier Club, taking customary Curtis portraits of the members—with the soft lighting, the finished photogravure touches, the fishhook signature that was his brand but often did not come from his actual hand—in return for room and board. He also gave the club Indian pictures to pay the rent, including many of his masterpieces. With every prolonged stay, the Rainier Club added to its collection, becoming in time a museum of sorts to a destitute member.
While he was no longer seeing Clara except for stiff and restrained discussions of family and business, Curtis kept up his correspondence with the guardian of J. P. Morgan’s library, Belle da Costa Greene. She was his lifeline; should she turn against Curtis, Morgan might well cut him off. From the Puget Sound winter cabin, he sent her pictures and letters.
My Dear Miss Greene:
Just to let you know that I am alive and at work, and should be able to close up this camp by the middle of May. This has proved to be a very satisfactory and comfortable working camp. I am taking the liberty of sending you a small picture of the cabin, so that you can see what wintertime looks like in this region.
He dropped pictures from many western locales into Miss Greene’s mailbox, a form of showmanship that other artists in Morgan’s circle could not rival. There he was on a white horse among the Spokane, with a tip of his hat, and there on a mesa in Arizona, and this one shows him fording a river in the Rockies, and just look at the privation of these writing cabins. In every picture he was a man of action in the middle of the scene. But these shots masked a person who had lost his infinite sources of energy. Heavy cigarette smoking in confined, damp spaces and lack of sleep exacted a toll. By the end of that winter in Waterman, Curtis was exhausted. He took to bed for ten days, trying to edit while lying on his back—the most painful convalescence he’d suffered in two decades. Back then, he had Clara to care for him, and she adored him. This time, he had the faithful Myers at hand, but his talents were limited to sprightly shorthand and lucid prose of the type that took final shape in the volume on Joseph’s tribe.
“The Nez Perce, a mentally superior people, were friendly from their first contact with white men, and as a tribe they always desired to be so,” he wrote, drafting Volume VIII. “Their history since 1855, and particularly in the war of 1877, tells how they were repaid for their loyalty to the white brother.” It was an opinion. But also a fact. The Nez Perce had been betrayed—kicked in the ass, as Curtis put it to Meany once—perhaps more so, without cause or reason, than any tribe. They had not raped and scalped and raided and plundered. They had done nothing but cooperate with whites, without pandering to them. Curtis had pulled his punches with Custer, and kept his views to himself about the brutal mistreatment of the Navajo at the hands of that well-regarded American hero Kit Carson. Even in his description of the Cheyenne, aside from the account of the Sand Creek massacre, he’d shown restraint. But—damn all!—he would not hold back on the Nez Perce. If a reader could look into the face of Chief Joseph, could hear the story of the long retreat, the broken promises, the imprisonment in Oklahoma, the decimation of a superior band of human beings, and not feel some anger, then Curtis would have trouble living with himself. His North American Indian was a record, after all, and the record on this band of people was horrid. Look what they’d started with: fine, timber-framed houses, a horse-breeding culture that Lewis and Clark said was better than that developed on Virginia plantations, music and language behind stories that explained the mysteries of the world, and a diet and way of life that promoted longevity. Look what they’d ended up with: early death, jail, treaties ignored, the noble descendants of a line of intelligent, resourceful leaders staring at winter snows in exile on the Columbia Plateau.
“Their unfortunate effort to retain what was rightly their own makes an unparalleled story in the annals of the Indian resistance to the greed of whites.”
And once Curtis had started down this narrative road, he could not stop, and did not want to. Myers and Hodge might second-guess him, but these words would stand, because the Nez Perce were subject to “dishonest and relentless subjection.” So, for the first time, a gust of outrage made it into The North American Indian. Even after surrendering their land, after living as prisoners of war in arid country far from the Northwest, after the tribe had been broken up along religious and treaty factions, they faced new indignities. That, in the view Curtis now held, was the way the United States did business with nations that were recognized as sovereign. All of this, Curtis concluded, “is nothing more than we might have expected, for we as a nation have rarely kept, unmodified, any compact with the Indians.” There was no turning back; from then on, The North American Indian was not just a showcase of the best of the native world, but a bullhorn for a man who had seen the worst of it.
After the near-calamitous drop down Celilo Falls, the Curtis party scooted through several more stretches of violent white water, arriving at a place known as Bridge of the Gods. It was no bridge but the crumbled foundations of an arch that indicated an ancient basalt piece of the mountain had once straddled the river. It was here that Lewis and Clark had used ropes to lower their canoes down. Myers laughed as Noggie continued to cry.
“Take his picture,” said Myers, pointing to the cloudy-eyed cook. For anyone who thought the Curtis Indian work was all glamour and exploration, the tears of Noggie would tell another story. At Bridge of the Gods, Curtis could use the one major mechanical manipulation of the river to date, a section of primitive but effective government locks. It was little more than a side channel of the main river, an escalator, both ways, of water that allowed passage. After clearing the locks, the group faced a fresh section of swollen and enraged river. The lock keeper said he could not recall when the river had been so high. But the old bar pilot, who had hired on with Curtis for one last ride down the Columbia, thought otherwise—wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before. Sure, the lock keeper said, but not in a boat as small and fragile-looking as the one owned by The North American Indian.
“No man alive could make it with that . . . tub,” said the lock keeper. “The currents have changed since your day.” Curtis fired up the gas engine. He was determined to go ahead; the tiny propeller would give them just enough oomph to get through. He ordered everyone aboard.
“Well, Captain,” the lock keeper told the pilot, “it’s your funeral.” Curtis moved to t
he bow while the pilot guided the tiller. But as they started, the sea-weathered skipper seemed to lose his nerve.
“This ain’t navigation,” he shouted above the percussive claps of the Columbia, “this is a boxing match . . . Ride ’em high. Don’t let a whirlpool get us.” As they plunged through the first series of breakers, icy water crashed over them. Then, bobbing through another round, the boat pitched headfirst, bucked up and shot sideways. The lurch nearly threw Curtis into the river. They struggled to stay atop the crests, waves on either side of them. They wrestled with the currents of several eddies, where the water encircled and gripped whatever came its way, and there the engine proved a lifesaver. In one of the whirlpools was a large tree, stripped of its branches, vertical in the water. They had no sooner evaded that trap than a ridge of water collapsed over them. The boat was buried, but popped up and drifted to a side where it was calmer. Soaked and badly shaken, the men pulled their craft ashore. Noggie looked catatonic with fear. The captain was white-faced, lips purple, body trembling. The worst was over. But the price proved high for Curtis’s team. Both cook and river pilot said they’d had enough. They quit and departed immediately for Portland. Now it was left to Curtis, Myers and Schwinke. “I became both captain and cook,” wrote Curtis. That was just as well, for Curtis had complained about the lousy food made by all of his cooks.
And that night, he showed a skill that he’d first developed as a boy braising muskrat for his family in Wisconsin. He bought an enormous salmon from a fisherman, a spring Chinook, filleted it and cooked it next to a fire, Indian style, on cedar sticks, searing the outside, keeping the inside tender and moist. “It was the fattest, juiciest salmon I’ve ever tasted,” Curtis wrote in one of his culinary digressions. “We ate until there was nothing left but the bones.”
