by Timothy Egan
The picture opera was supposed to solve the money woes that had shadowed Curtis ever since he abandoned a prosperous life of studio photography to hitch his years to Indian pictures. A fresh infusion of cash from Morgan, $60,000 in late 1909, went straight to Curtis’s creditors. As a condition of that new money, Morgan had Curtis incorporate The North American Indian and put the operation in the hands of a board of directors in New York. The decision would haunt Curtis, but he was out of options. The 1910 fieldwork—on the Columbia, along the Pacific Coast of Washington and among tribes of Vancouver Island—had been conducted on a shoestring, without money for interpreters or an aide to handle logistics. And since Curtis had also moved out of his house—“address me at the Rainier Club, as usual,” he told Hodge beginning in 1910—he had to set aside a certain number of hours to earn his room and board. By the summer of 1911, Curtis was faced with putting the Indian project on indefinite hold. It would be the first summer in more than a decade when he didn’t spend all his time on tribal land. He was embarrassed, humbled, his confidence rattled, as he finally told his editor the truth about his impoverishment. “Outside of some absolute miracle there is no chance whatever for my getting funds for field work this year,” he wrote Hodge.
It was while stuck in this eddy of despair that Curtis had come up with the idea of the traveling picture opera. The Curtis name was enough to quickly attract backers, who set up an itinerary stretching over two years. A business agent booked halls, found musicians and arranged screen setups, hotels and other work. Curtis hoped that the tour would generate enough money to get his team back into Indian country, the only place where he now felt at home. But by early fall, just as Curtis was about to launch the road show, he was already physically spent. Simultaneously, he had tried to finish the fieldwork with Columbia River tribes, initiate photographic forays among Northwest Coast Indians and handle the myriad tasks of putting together a traveling picture opera production. It was no exaggeration when Curtis was told he was trying to do the work of fifty men. For the second time in two years, he was confined to his bed at the Rainier Club. He collapsed in exhaustion.
After rousing himself for fresh touring in 1912, he took a break of sorts in the summer to work with the tribes that lived along the Pacific shore, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca north. He also managed a quick trip to the Southwest, an opposite climate. After spending time with the Hopi in 1900, 1902, 1904, 1906 and 1911, this latest visit was both jarring and familiar. No tribe had been more welcoming, save perhaps some members of the Crow. He knew enough of the language to greet old friends, and he knew enough of the religion to take umbrage at the creeping vines of missionaries moving over Hopi land. He was startled by how much things had changed. Automobiles rambled along ancient sheep paths. Packaged and powdered food from the government was taking the dietary place of traditional dried meat or cornmeal. The children, back from boarding school, had short hair. Curtis felt fortunate that he had taken so many pictures early on, for there was little of original Hopi life left to be seen, he complained. The habits and routines of daily existence, refined over centuries, had been swapped for those of mainstream America. For the anthropologist, whether a self-educated one with a camera or a pedigreed one backed by a federal grant, there is nothing more disappointing than the banality of modern life.
His views of God had expanded considerably since his days as a boy in a canoe with the colicky preacher and his Bible verses. Early on, Curtis came to believe that the key to getting deep inside the Indian world was to try to understand—and experience, if possible—its religion. He rarely proclaimed the superiority of a Christian deity over one that was alive in the rocks or a small creature. In his enlarged tolerance for the native spiritual world, Curtis grew increasingly impatient with those who tried to impose a dominant religious orthodoxy on these people. And, no doubt, self-interest was at stake: his life’s toil, after all, was devoted to Indians “still retaining their primitive ways.” Could his camera ever find anything in a church pew, the men in clipped and combed hair, the women with dowdy shawls, to match a naked priest in glorious body paint at dawn?
Curtis had been questioned while on tour about his picture opera’s title and the theme that ran through every volume of his work: vanishing race. To the surprise of some authorities, the census of 1910 counted 276,000 Indians in the United States—a gain of 39,000 over 1900. Yet Indians made up less than a single percent of the nation’s 92 million people. But vanishing? How could that be if the overall numbers were going in a positive direction? Several scholars, quoted in Curtis profiles in the newspapers, started to take issue with him. “We have as many Indians now as ever existed in the United States,” said one authority in the New York Times.
Curtis called that “an absolutely ridiculous statement.” He said the census had been too broad, counting those with just a strand of Indian heritage. Curtis estimated only about 100,000 “purebloods” were left from shore to shore. He explained what he had witnessed over the past ten years. Along the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark had seen thousands of people in numerous communities, Curtis found only two small villages with a combined population of less than 200. Around the greater Puget Sound area, where the government had estimated 75,000 natives at treaty time, “today there are scarcely 2,000,” said Curtis. The Crow had gone from a population of 9,000 in the nineteenth century to 1,787 in the twentieth. The Atsina numbered barely 500, down by 75 percent. The Piegan, who once counted 12,000 members, now had barely a tenth of that. All the evidence—again, as he saw among the Hopi—was of diminishment and loss. Curtis cited Geronimo’s own words, from his ghostwritten autobiography of 1906, in which he said, “We are vanishing from the earth.” Geronimo himself had recently left the planet, after he got drunk one night and fell off a horse-drawn wagon.
Beyond that, raw population figures were not the crux of the issue. Religion, lifestyle, language—fast disappearing. “Whether the American aborigines are a vanishing race or not, the vital question is one of culture rather than of numbers,” he said in defense of his work. In his public appearances Curtis was often asked: in a generation’s time, would anything be left of the real Indian? And on occasion would come a rejoinder, though not from him: it’s not up to a white photographer to define authenticity.
In the fall of 1912, he was back on the road with the picture opera, the same routine as earlier, till the end of the year. The tour was a runaway success, judging by the reviews and the crowds, but it did not make Curtis financially whole. In business matters he was a consistent failure, and his hard-luck streak continued with this production. Like a lot of artists, Curtis had a reverse Midas touch: the creative dream, stoked by audacity, always trumped pragmatic concerns. A more earthbound man would have made a radical change in plans when troubling signs appeared at the first stagings of the musical. Ticket sales were strong, but after paying for everything Curtis came up short—$300 to $500 per show, even after sellouts. Road expenses were much higher than he had anticipated. “Cheer up,” he wrote Hodge, a bit of springy sarcasm creeping into his voice, “the worst is yet to come.”
Indeed, a few months later he was staring at bankruptcy. “My losses during the winter have been very heavy,” he confided to one friend, halfway into the tour. He took out loans from J. P. Morgan, though he tried to keep it secret, for these were not the kind of patron-and-artist deals of earlier days that had been sent to the newspapers for favorable headlines; this was survival money, at 6 percent interest. Two promissory notes in the Morgan archive, one for $12,500, another for $5,000, show Curtis going deeper into his benefactor’s keep. No matter: he would never give up, he explained to the House of Morgan. His written list of subscribers included the following names:
HIS MAJESTY, GEORGE, KING OF ENGLAND
HIS MAJESTY, ALBERT, KING OF THE BELGIANS
ANDREW CARNEGIE
MRS. E. H. HARRIMAN
JAMES J. HILL
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
MRS. FREDERICK V
ANDERBILT
H. E. HUNTINGTON
S. R. GUGGENHEIM
COL. ALDEN BLETHEN
GIFFORD PINCHOT
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
He was hustling the Vatican, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis, and more than three dozen institutions, ranging from the National Library of Wales to the Spokane Public Library. More than ever, he was two people: the public Curtis, celebrated onstage, fussed over by some of the most famous names in the Western world, and the private Curtis, a lonely man without a permanent home, who couldn’t display two nickels that he hadn’t borrowed from someone else. Curtis had obtained a $3,000 loan from Pinchot, who was ginning up Teddy Roosevelt’s independent run for the presidency on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. The prickly forester was quite the nag on the repayment schedule, and the money may have been more bother than it was worth. In a long explanation for Morgan’s staff on how he had come up so short, Curtis blamed his youth and naïveté at the time when the titan first agreed to fund him. The terms of the contract, in which Curtis worked for free and had to rely on advance payments of $3,000 per subscription just to bring the books out, were fatally flawed. Expenses far exceeded income. His team never rested, having traveled enough “to encircle the globe twenty times.” He accepted the blame, and faulted himself for letting early flattery overwhelm common sense. “Frankly, being young then, I did not properly discount the enthusiastic commendation and gush,” he wrote. To Belle Greene he was more candid, confiding his deepest fear: that the great project was not just stalled, but was over—dead well before its finish.
“It is with considerable hesitation that I speak in this way,” he wrote Greene, “but it is only fair that you have knowledge of the situation.” With her, he said, he felt “a sympathetic interest” in the work. He explained how he had given his life to creating a lasting record of the continent’s first people, and in so doing, “I have made about every sacrifice a human being can for the sake of the work, and the work is worth it.” Long gone from the pages of that letter was any trace of the cocksure Shadow Catcher who strode into Morgan’s den in 1906 and walked out a King of the World. Now he spoke of posterity and the greater good, like his preacher father appealing for funds to do the Lord’s work. His Indian volumes would belong to the ages, and for that “the people of the American continent will look upon it as one of Mr. Morgan’s greatest gifts to man.” The stunning news in this letter, buried deep, was that even if he could get back on his feet financially, Curtis would need many more years than he’d envisioned to complete all twenty volumes. Originally, of course, he told Morgan he could finish in five years. Then, to the New York Times, he had stretched that deadline to thirteen years. Now he told Belle Greene, “field research is a matter of twenty-three to twenty-five years.” Yes, a generation’s time, and maybe then some, was needed. By that calculation, Curtis might not be done until 1931—an eternity.
At the same time, Curtis no longer held back in press interviews when asked about government treatment of Indians. Once he’d crossed his own line with Volume VIII, on the Nez Perce, he didn’t hesitate to express open contempt. Clipped of his confidence and much of his sense of self-worth, Curtis was more empathetic toward the beaten subjects he photographed. “We have wronged the Indian from the beginning,” he said in a lengthy magazine profile. “The white man’s sins against him did not cease with the explosion of the final cartridge in the wars which subjugated him in his own country. Our sins of peace . . . have been far greater than our sins of war . . . In peace, we changed the nature of our weapons, that was all; we stopped killing Indians in more or less a fair fight, debauching them, instead, thus slaughtering them by methods which gave them not the slightest chance of retaliation.”
When the show landed in Seattle in the fall of 1912, Curtis was greeted by a fawning crowd at the city’s opera house. Onstage were fake rocks and real totem poles. In the orchestra pit was a twenty-two-piece ensemble. Meany introduced his friend to the audience, was lavish in praise and then beamed throughout the production. Curtis’s daughters applauded wildly; their phantom father was home, and everyone loved him. The city embraced its most famous citizen. He retired late at night to his bunk at the Rainier Club, the huzzahs still ringing in his ears.
Curtis sized up his years: he was almost midway through a masterpiece, hailed as such from coast to coast. Eight volumes had been published. If one of the streetcars clanking up and down the hills of Seattle ran over Curtis, his place in history would be assured. “Such a big dream,” as he originally told Bird Grinnell, could actually be realized, though perhaps not in the span of a single man’s lifetime. Nonetheless, an epic achievement. His personal life was a disaster—facing bankruptcy and a failed marriage. His mother was ill, his estranged wife could not stand the sight of him, and he was not on speaking terms with his brother Asahel. Curtis’s debts were in excess of $50,000, and he had less than $150 in the bank. He had told Hodge that “if I had an earthly thing that was not mortgaged, I should immediately start out to find some one to loan me a few dollars on it.” The larger problem, should he ever crawl out of this financial sinkhole, was that by the end of 1912, J. P. Morgan owned Curtis.
Now to the positive side. His children loved him, and he talked of bringing them into the business. Beth, as a teenager, showed an adult’s understanding of what was required to make a great picture in the studio, and she had infinite energy, just like her father. The two standout talents on his staff, Bill Myers on the book project and Adolph Muhr in the studio, were still with him, as was Ella McBride. Their work had never been better. Money came mainly from selling Indian prints to tourists from the Curtis studio. At the age of forty-four, though he had suffered two physical breakdowns, Curtis still had the fire in his belly. At times he felt like the fearless and peripatetic twenty-five-year-old who ran up and down Mount Rainier, a cigarette clenched between his lips, heavy glass plates on his back.
And Curtis had two more things going for him at year’s end: a boat and a fresh plan. The vessel was the Elsie Allen, forty feet long, more than ten feet at the beam, with both a gas engine and sails, a sleek craft built by Skokomish Indians for salmon fishing. Curtis had purchased the boat, cheap, at the end of the Columbia River expedition in 1910, not long after he let his tiny craft go to a watery grave off the Pacific shore. The new boat had proved tough and seaworthy plying the high surf off the Washington coast in that year, where Curtis got to know the continent’s western whaling people, the Makah. And it was just the right size for sailing in and out of the fjords of British Columbia. Curtis was developing an obsession—not unlike his love of the Crow and Hopi—for the coastal tribe up north known as Kwakiutl. The new plan had to do with sailing away on the Elsie Allen, up the Strait of Georgia, to put together a feature-length film. Curtis had traveled with a motion-picture camera since 1906. By 1912, thanks to advances in technology, this fledgling entertainment form had taken off; every American town of any size now had a picture theater. For Curtis, film was a logical next step. When he ducked into a nickelodeon to watch a half-dozen short films, he found himself in a familiar setting—live music and a projection onstage, just like his touring show. Some of the early silent films even had painted negatives, giving a number of their scenes color, though the process was costly and labor intensive. The problem with these silent cinematic bites was length. The Great Train Robbery, produced in 1903, made use of pioneering techniques like cross-cutting and close-ups, but it was only twelve minutes long. The popular films of the first years of the century were mostly primitive westerns—a cowboy aiming his pistol at the camera, causing many in the audience to shriek and duck—or chase films, a thief pursued by cops, or stagy theatrical numbers. By the time Curtis was mulling over his film, multireel picture shows were starting to hit theaters. Using several projectors, the way Curtis had employed a pair of stereopticon portals to put his still images onscreen, filmmakers could show a continuous story lasting almost an hour.
Curt
is wanted to film a mythic tale of native people in the days before European contact. He thought the Kwakiutl, with their ornamented war canoes, their striking totem poles and house posts, their large-timbered communal lodges, their hunting prowess off the dangerous Pacific shore, and a history that gave some credence to those who said they once dabbled in headhunting and ritual cannibalism, would be the perfect subject to fill a movie screen. There would be action, drama, love, war, mystery and history, all of it from a world about which Americans knew little. No tribe on the continent had developed more elaborate, artistically detailed masks and costumes of salmon, wolves, turtles, frogs, bears, eagles and ravens. “Their ceremonies are developed to a point which fully justifies the word dramatic,” Curtis wrote.
He would seek to re-create a story of maritime magical realism. Yet it would not be fiction, as he imagined it, but rather “a documentary picture of the Kwakiutl tribes.” This was a novel idea. The newsreel era was still some years away. What passed for reality cinema—called actuality films—were travelogues or boring clips of ships arriving in port or trains pulling out of a station. Curtis would use an all-Indian cast, all Kwakiutl, not a single Italian in face paint on a Hollywood back lot. He would shoot on location. He would make sure that every prop used, every costume worn, was authentic. The artwork, the houses, the totems, the dugout canoes, the masks, the weapons—all would be made by Kwakiutl hands. He would record native music and get musicians to play it. In essence, the film was a grand expansion of his still pictures and written narratives. Most people who heard his outline thought it was brilliant. Curtis had no doubt he could pull it off, though it would involve a new round of begging from fresh donors. But this film business, he insisted, would be a moneymaking proposition, unlike the picture books. Film was the future. Going over the numbers, he thought he would have little trouble making enough on this movie, and several others, to win freedom from debt and get his great work back on track. He organized the Continental Film Company and sent out a prospectus to investors. “The profits to be had from such pictures are quite large,” he wrote, “and exceptionally substantial dividends can be depended upon.” With success, he estimated, the company could make a profit of $100,000 on his first film. And so, with this venture into the new world of motion-picture storytelling, Edward Curtis doubled down: the way to save The North American Indian was to create the world’s first feature-length documentary film.
