Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  Afterward, the picture-taking and story-gathering took on a mournful tone. Where the Corps of Discovery had written of long-settled communities, Curtis struggled to meet a soul. The native people were spent by time and disease. At the site of a formerly large village “we found only two descendants.” In other places, the tribes were gone completely, their only trace a bit of rock art scraped onto basalt columns. Just the “old friends” of Curtis, the Wishham, still had a somewhat active village, on the north shore of the river, down from the falls. In talking to Wishham elders, Curtis heard stories of creation, and of how a good spirit had vanquished an evildoer who tied people to a log at the Columbia’s mouth and left them to die. The river’s bounty, he was told, was a result of a god who had opened a pen where all the salmon had been kept and let them run free forever. He also heard stories of death and decay, the later myths conforming to the loss of the societies.

  Both women and men were tattooed. They used canoes in the way inland tribes used horses. They were sexually open, had large, permanent villages and held slaves. The collapse arrived slowly at first and then all at once. The first wave hit after initial white contact, when the diseases for which the Indians had no immunity—cholera, measles, smallpox—killed indiscriminately. Alcohol was next, overwhelming people during the late nineteenth century. This pattern was familiar in its mortal precision, and no part of it surprised Curtis. What stood out in this case was the river. Indians would cross the Columbia in their dugouts to trade salmon and furs for whiskey. They returned drunk, and “whole families were thus wiped out in a moment,” Curtis wrote.

  The problems for the natives now came from trying to find their way in the twentieth century with greatly diminished numbers. The national census of 1910 had begun, and if counters found anything like what Curtis had seen up close over the last decade—with the Crow, the Sioux and the Indians of the Columbia River—the tribes were even more endangered than he believed. That year, in doing advance work, Myers had found only two surviving members of another tribe, whose name was associated with a famous Pacific Coast oyster, the Willapa. As a conservative guess, Curtis estimated that 95 percent of the original population along the lower river was gone. With the exception of the Wishham, “the Chinook tribes on the river . . . were practically extinct.”

  For all their troubles, Curtis presented the Wishham in their best light, from a beautiful woman pounding salmon to a sinewy man netting fish. He shot pictures of petroglyphs, fishing platforms and heroic people in the face of a river’s power—in line with his original desire to have “nature tell the story.” Some years in the future, these images would be hanging in a gallery, a museum, a home, a tribal headquarters or on the wall of a prestigious private club, and people would see what life had been like before all the river was flaccid, clipped by more than a dozen big dams, a “slackwater empire,” as the writer Blaine Harden later called it.

  To the ocean, the Curtis party of three pushed on, the rapids behind them, the Columbia bar, that collision of high surf and emptying water, ahead of them. The river was so wide it looked like a slow-moving lake, littered with the flotsam of forests. The most productive American fishing fleet was in full frenzy along the shore, with the canneries at Astoria packing salmon to feed the world. Curtis knew he should not risk passage over the bar at river’s end. The biggest danger on the Columbia was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, where more boats had been lost than any other place on the West Coast. In the best of times—calm, windless—it was a tussle between tidal might and river current. Even long-experienced bar pilots guiding sea-tested vessels found the crossing a white-knuckle drama. Sailors would tie themselves to their ship masts to keep from being tossed overboard. Just upriver from this battleground, Curtis anchored his tiny craft and went ashore. He picked oysters at low tide, a kind known for its sweet, somewhat briny taste. He started a beach fire of driftwood, and stoked it until there was a bed of hot coals. Then, with the tide rising, he unleashed his boat and let it go—into the arms of the River of the West, away to violent swells of the bar, “our worthy but nondescript craft adrift that it might float out to meet the ocean breakers and be battered to fragments.” At sunset, Curtis cooked the oysters; just a few moments on the coals and the hard shells popped open with a hiss. The men sat on the sand at land’s end and ate their fill, Curtis, Myers, and Schwinke, all that was left of the field team, slurping bivalves in the fading light of early summer, wondering if the continent itself had run out of Indians.

  The Fisherman—Wishham, 1910. Curtis took a wild ride down the undammed Columbia River in 1910. To his dismay, the once thriving tribes that had lived for millennia off the river’s salmon had dwindled to a handful of natives.

  12. New Art Forms

  1910–1913

  BACKSTAGE AT CARNEGIE HALL, Curtis waited for the lights to dim and the orchestra to finish tuning up. When the hum of chatter died down, he peeked out at a house packed with pink-jowled swells in stiff-collared tuxedos and women with jewels glittering atop perfumed décolletage. The New York social set had paid top dollar to listen to the Shadow Catcher talk about savages. And more than talk: he was presenting “The Story of a Vanishing Race,” a picture opera. But tonight’s offering was not purely opera. Nor was it all static picture show. This touring spectacle was a uniquely Curtis hybrid. The visuals were slides from the photographer’s work over a fifteen-year span. He had painstakingly hand-colored the slides, so that rock walls at sunset in Canyon de Chelly had an apricot glow, and the faces shot at the magic hour in New Mexico gave off a rugged blush. Montana’s altocumulus-clouded ceiling could never be the true robin’s-egg blue, but it was close. Using a stereopticon projector, or magic lantern as it was called, Curtis could dissolve two colored-tinted pictures, creating narrative motion. He supplemented the stills with film, some of it sandpaper-grainy and herky-jerky, but still—action! And all of these images buttressed a story, narrated by Curtis himself, about an epic tragedy: the slow fade of a people who had lived fascinating lives long before the grandparents of those in Carnegie box seats sailed from Old Europe to seize their homeland. What made the entire experience memorable was the music, from an orchestra playing a score conducted by the renowned Henry F. Gilbert and inspired by the recordings of Indian songs and chants that Curtis had brought home on his wax cylinders. Gilbert had been among the first popular composers to use black gospel music and ragtime. He now took on the challenge of translating Indian music through conventional instruments. The whole of it was a visual-aural feast of the aboriginal, as the critics called it, created by a most American artist at the height of his fame.

  Curtis was pleased to see that “The Story of a Vanishing Race” was a sellout, especially in Manhattan. There was no more prestigious interior space in the land than Carnegie’s Main Hall, two blocks from Central Park, a venue then twenty years old and home to the New York Philharmonic. But when he looked from behind the curtain one last time, his heart sank at the absence of a single person—Belle da Costa Greene. Curtis had written her from the road, from Boston, with updates of the reviews and crowds as the production rolled through Concord, Providence, Manchester and New Haven on the way to New York. The show was a hit. Capacity crowds! Standing ovations! Rave reviews! He enclosed tickets—front row, of course—for J. P. Morgan, Miss Greene and any number in their entourage. On November 15, 1911, the day of the Carnegie show, came a reply from the librarian: Morgan would be spending the evening with his daughter. “As you know, it is very difficult to get him to go anywhere,” Greene wrote Curtis at his hotel.

  Yes, of course he knew. Since obtaining the initial financing in 1906, Curtis had seen very little of Morgan, despite long stays in Manhattan. “He spends his time lunching with kings or kaisers or buying Raphaels,” said a British patron. The cigar, the top hat, the cane, the hideous purple nose—Curtis experienced very little of the Morgan persona after signing his initial deal. The face of the titan, if not the hand that wrote the checks, was in the person of the
enchanting gray-eyed Miss Greene. So, while Curtis didn’t expect the aging Morgan to trundle uptown on a November night, he held out hope that the public representative of his patron would be in attendance on the evening of his highest honor. Earlier that year, he had taken his son Harold to visit Belle Greene at the Morgan Library. Hal was impressed at the setting and people in the rich man’s circle who knew and praised his father.

  In her reply to Curtis’s invitation, Greene was cryptic about her plans for the night, sending “our best wishes for your success in your lecture this evening.” It wasn’t a lecture, damnit! This was something new, groundbreaking, a picture opera. Here was a chance for Belle to see Curtis in another light. Not the desperate man of those lengthy letters from some distant outpost, answering accounting questions, begging for more time, another check in advance, please, please, Miss Greene. Not the harried, deadline-driven artist whose latest installments always carried a note of apology for the tardiness of the publication schedule. Yes, he knew he’d promised Morgan to deliver twenty volumes in five years, and with the time almost expired on their agreement, he was just bringing out the eighth volume. He was reminded regularly that he was woefully short of the five hundred subscriptions he’d promised to sell as a way to keep himself from going back to the well of the tycoon. So be it, Curtis told himself: doing something world class meant deadlines and dollars were never going to fall in line.

  Belle Greene did not lack for a social schedule, most of it on behalf of Morgan. At night, she liked to be seen, and was known to drink and flirt with people ranging from the archbishop to the artist yet to sell a first painting. By day, though, she was all business. “If a person is a worm,” she once said, “you step on him.” She wrote many of Morgan’s letters. She bought gifts that he presented to others as his own thoughtful touch. She gossiped, in private parlors and in letter form, about the mistresses of Mr. Morgan. She posed for the painter Paul César Helleu, who presented her in a regal side profile. And, most importantly, her influence over what artifacts of artistic or literary merit would find their way into Morgan’s library had expanded as the rich man grew befuddled and sluggish in his eighth decade. The secret of her past was intact, though still subject to much speculation. Her father was far out of sight, living at the world’s edge in a diplomatic post in Siberia. Belle had not spoken to him in at least ten years. And she kept lying about her age: was she twenty-five or thirty? “She moved her birth date around like a potted plant,” the Morgan biographer Jean Strouse wrote. At the time that Curtis was hoping to impress her at Carnegie Hall, Belle was twenty-seven years old and in an open love affair with a married man, Bernard Berenson, a Renaissance art historian whose principal home was a hillside villa outside Florence. How could Curtis compete with that?

  For adulation, he had to settle on the man who introduced him that night in New York, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. A nephew of J. P. Morgan, Osborn was wealthy by birth, hugely influential in some circles, and largely in the Curtis camp. He was also a kook who believed, like other educated men of his age, in the inferiority of some races and their inherent criminality, which could be determined by the size of a person’s skull. He had even written President Roosevelt, going on at length about the head size of people from Sicily, implying that the great wave of Italian immigration sweeping over the United States was not a good thing, and raising concern about “the blending of long-skulled and short-skulled types.” In other writings, he said the “Negroid race” was in a “state of arrested brain development” because blacks had come from hot equatorial climes that did not foster intellectual advancement. (How might he explain the intelligence and charm of Miss Greene, his uncle’s keeper, had he known she was from a black family?) Nordic whites came in for much praise, defined as “broad-headed, gray-eyed Alpines or Celts, short of stature, very Irish in appearance, but without the excitable Irish temperament.”

  Though such nonsense passed for science in the highest New York circles, Curtis would have none of it. His theme, consistent from the beginning, was that Indians were spiritual, adaptive people with complex societies. They had been massively misunderstood from the start of their encounters with European settlers, and were passing away before the eyes of a generation, mostly through no fault of their own. For them, the present was all of decline, the future practically nonexistent, the past glorious.

  “The average conception of the Indian is as a cruel, blood-reeking warrior, a vigorous huntsman, a magnificent paint-and-feather-bedecked specimen of primitive man,” said Curtis in a full-page profile in the New York Times, reading from his talking points for the picture opera. “Of such we have no end of mental pictures, but to the wonderful inner and devotional life we are largely strangers.” The Times praised Curtis for the work he had done to preserve tribal languages—twenty-nine vocabularies, recorded and transcribed, thus far. The paper was one of the few institutions to notice this remarkable feat. “Five hundred years from now the value of this work will be beyond all calculation,” the Times said. “And it is chiefly for posterity that he and Mr. Morgan are working.” But for the first time, in print, Curtis revealed the bare truth about his schedule. He was far, far behind, he acknowledged: it would take at least eight more years, until 1919, to finish all twenty volumes.

  Osborn appeared nervous as he introduced the man now heralded as the world’s foremost expert on American Indians; his voice was weak, tinny, and he failed to rouse the audience. But as the house lights dimmed and the orchestra burst into sound, as images filled the screen and Curtis walked to the side of the stage to read his words, Carnegie Hall was transformed. Gilbert conducted the musicians with one hand and guided the projectionist with the other, synchronizing pictures with music. The screen jumped to life with terraced houses reaching into a desert sky and deep gorges where the first Americans still lived, followed by pictures of slender canoes in the crashing Pacific surf, whirling rapids of the Columbia River, the wind-raked high plains east of Glacier National Park, the red earthen pueblos of New Mexico.

  “My greatest desire tonight is that each and every person here enter into the spirit of our evening with the Indians. We cannot weigh, measure or judge their culture with our philosophy. From our analytical and materialistic viewpoint, theirs is a strange world. Deity . . . is everywhere present.” And off Curtis went on his oratorical flight, explaining the Great Mystery, the logic behind fasting and sweat lodges, the offerings to the sun, to snakes and to cedar. But it was wrong to see nothing more than primitive animism in these rituals. “It is often said of certain tribes that they are sun-worshippers,” Curtis told the audience. “To call them sun-worshippers is, I believe, in most instances about as nearly right as it would be to call all Christian people cross-worshippers. In other words, the sun is but the symbol of the power.”

  The music swelled as the painted slides passed by, featuring faces to match the surroundings: deeply lined elders on a bluff and smooth-cheeked maidens nearly naked by a waterway, idyllic in their settings but also, especially in the portraits, steely and recalcitrant. Just look at Joseph, and Geronimo, and Red Hawk. Men who never sold out their people, hauled off to prisons far from the lands of their birth, then sent to their graves in humiliation. He let these dead warriors glare at the Carnegie crowd, a bit of psychic revenge. The cinematic portion of the night included the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo and the Hopi Snake Dance that Curtis had participated in.

  The audience loved it. They were “lifted out of the prosaic into the wild, romantic life of the redman,” the New York Evening World wrote. A few days later, Curtis was given an equally rapturous reception in Washington, at the Belasco Theater, where he entertained a sold-out crowd that included foreign ambassadors, judges, senators and President Taft. “A pictorial and musical gem,” the Washington Times called it. Roosevelt was not in town, having vacated the White House more than two years earlier, but he sent Curtis a note praising him for doing “a good thing for the whole
American people.” Curtis was hailed by one paper as “a rare interpretive artist,” and by another as “at once a national institution and a national benefit.” And lo, shortly thereafter, he finally cracked the thick sandstone walls of the Smithsonian Castle: the board agreed to buy a full subscription of The North American Indian. Writing to Meany, Curtis was euphoric at the reaction. In New York, Osborn had turned to him and said Curtis had just won over an audience “that few men in their lifetime have the privilege of facing.” One night, a show at the Brooklyn Institute got off to a rough start with a host, the scientist Franklin Hooper, who was skeptical of Curtis’s contributions to native scholarship. By curtain’s close, Hooper told Curtis he was the first man to give “the real Indian” to an American audience.

  “Dear Brother Meany,” Curtis reported on his New York appearances, “the enthusiasm was quite out of the ordinary.” As usual, this triumph had come with no small amount of sweat and pain. “I passed through 17 kinds of hell in getting this thing underway.” In a rare breach of modesty, Curtis confided that he might allow himself to revel in his reviews—if only for a moment. Go ahead and gloat, Meany advised. “You are too sensible to let your head swell too much, but the temptation would certainly entrap an ordinary mortal.” The swelling could never last anyway, Curtis indicated. In a letter to his editor Hodge, after recounting all the standing ovations, all the over-the-top reviews, the record crowds, the grueling pace (five shows a week), Curtis once again found himself in a familiar redoubt. “Just at the present moment we are somewhat broke.”