by Timothy Egan
In British Columbia, Curtis hired a man who lived in both the native and the white realms to be his guide to the Kwakiutl. George Hunt was a chap-faced, sunken-cheeked, foul-tempered son of a Tlingit woman and a Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company drunk. As a boy, he learned to read by copying labels at the trading post. His father beat him for his efforts at literacy, which sent young Hunt to a hideaway in the woods to continue his self-education. When he signed on with Curtis, Hunt was just short of his sixtieth birthday, with a droopy, frost-colored mustache, a freckled bald head and ever-present suspenders holding up his trousers. At first he helped primarily with Volume X. Unlike the previous books, this one would be devoted to a single tribe. Hunt found subjects and settings, and smoothed over disagreements. He was Curtis’s ticket to participate in sea lion hunts and forbidden ceremonies. “Inherently curious and acquisitive, and possessed of an excellent memory,” Curtis said of Hunt. “Our best authority of the Kwakiutl Indians is this man who, without a single day’s schooling, minutely records Indian customs in the native language and translates it word by word into intelligible English.” For the film, he designed sets, contracted actors at 50 cents a day and worked on story lines. Hunt was well qualified for his tasks: he’d married into the Kwakiutl, spoke the language of course, but also understood the needs of outside researchers. For nearly two decades, he had worked for Franz Boas, the German-born Jew considered the father of American anthropology. Their most significant season was a winter with the Kwakiutl—brooding and dark, with ceaseless rain outside, but full of theater and bright storytelling inside—that informed two expansive works Boas published on these people. In addition, Hunt helped to bring a Kwakiutl village to Chicago’s world’s fair in 1892, which gave him a taste of the staging and stereotypes that played best for a big urban audience. In Hunt, Curtis saw traits of Upshaw, his beloved Crow interpreter. He liked Hunt’s feistiness, his ambidextrous qualities on land and sea, his rough edges; in Hunt’s hardscrabble background there also was something of Curtis.
Building on what Boas and Hunt had assembled—and the original information collected on an earlier field trip of Myers’s—Curtis had plenty of written material for his account of Kwakiutl life. The problem was that what most interested him for his film had been outlawed by the Canadian government. Religious ceremonies, masked theater, exchanges of food and goods for the betterment of clan relationships—all were forbidden in Canada by decree in 1884. It was as if British authorities, during the long rule over the Irish in their homeland, had outlawed the Roman Catholic mass or dances built around Celtic songs. At one time, Hunt had been jailed for his role in resuscitating native rituals; he was released only after convincing the government that his actions were anthropological study—science.
At night, over a smoky fire of hissing wet wood, Curtis and Hunt would exchange rants against the government in distant Ottawa. They were particularly upset that it had outlawed the potlatch. Curtis had participated in this great giveaway, practiced by Northwest tribes from the Columbia River to Alaska, after the reburial of Chief Joseph. He knew it well, and he tried to set the record straight in The North American Indian, even correcting the much-respected Boas. The potlatch, said Curtis, was a source of great pride for the giver, rather than an act of greed for the recipient, as some missionaries had portrayed it. The government thought it would bankrupt families. But after participating in the Nez Perce giveaway following Joseph’s death, Curtis believed the potlatch was a way to ensure that riches were always passed around, that tribal wealth never stayed in one clan. In this belief he echoed the sentiments of Maquinna, the powerful Nootka chief, who compared the potlatch to a white man’s bank, saying, “When we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good.”
At the risk of imprisonment, Hunt went to work organizing a potlatch and other banned ceremonies for the film. Curtis also ordered him to collect skulls, angering some elders, in order to re-create what the ancient Kwakiutl did with the heads of rivals. This gave Curtis his movie’s title, with more than a nod at the popular market: In the Land of the Head-Hunters. To make film history, he would have to break the law.
With the picture opera tour at an end, and Hunt’s advance work under way in the north, Curtis returned to settle his personal affairs in Seattle. He rested, sleep coming much easier in the long night of the Northwest’s early winter. He renewed his work at the studio, catching up with some of the latest techniques in luminescent black-and-white printing being developed by Muhr, his wizard of the darkroom. Raising money for the new medium of film, he found, was not going to be nearly as difficult as selling subscriptions for the books. And then word came on December 11, 1912, of a personal loss: his mother, Ellen Sherriff Curtis, died at the home of her other Seattle son, Asahel. It was not unexpected; she was sixty-eight and had been ill. Young Ed Curtis had been the breadwinner for his mother in Wisconsin starting at the age of fourteen, and later at the Puget Sound homestead. After his studio became a success, he had moved her into his own crowded home in Seattle. But over the past decade, the famous son was never around, and she grew closer to Asahel. At the funeral, in the chapel at Butterworth & Sons in downtown Seattle, and at the burial at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the two brothers did not speak to each other.
Curtis moved to New York for the winter of 1913 to manage what had become a much more complicated enterprise under a board of directors. While fund-raising for the film, he’d stopped soliciting subscriptions for The North American Indian, much to the dismay of his overseers. They were in the midst of deciding how to resolve his debts when, on the last day of March, a Marconi wireless carried news of global impact from overseas: J. P. Morgan had died in Rome, at the age of seventy-five. After traveling to Egypt with his daughter and son-in-law, Morgan had suffered a series of small strokes, and then a much larger one. In Rome he took an eight-room suite at the Grand Hotel and tried to recover. Morgan turned the heat up in his quarters and refused to eat, though he sucked on a lit cigar. As word had leaked about his condition, the financial markets turned shaky. There was little the doctors could do but sedate him with morphine. On the day of his death, his temperature shot up to 104.5 degrees, and he faded in and out of consciousness. The titan’s body was taken by train to Paris, and then by ship to New York. Select mourners were allowed to view his casket at the Morgan Library. On the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange was closed until noon in his honor, and a parade of prominent capitalists walked past five thousand roses at the service in St. George’s Church.
“My heart and life are broken,” said Belle da Costa Greene.
She would be even more devastated after Morgan’s will was read. His estate, valued at about $80 million, was not nearly as great as had been speculated. Morgan had put most of his money into art, much of it housed in his library at Thirty-sixth and Madison. His collections were worth perhaps three times as much as the liquid assets in the will. After leaving multimillion-dollar trusts for his daughters, millions more for friends, charities and causes, he designated $3 million outright and the bulk of his fortune in stocks, bonds and property to his son, Jack. That included the library. Belle Greene was given $50,000 (just under $1 million today). The will stipulated that she be kept on in her current position.
To Curtis, the death meant more than the loss of a patron who had given wings to his work, the only rich man who stuck with him. Morgan as Medici also gave him freedom: he never told Curtis what to write or how to print a portrait. He never urged him to hold back on Custer, or bite his tongue when he lashed out at the government. His name was on the checks and on the title page of every volume to date, with a gracious credit.
Within days of the old man’s funeral, Jack Morgan signaled a change in direction. Art purchases that had been in the works were frozen, along with other commitments. When Curtis asked Belle Greene to lobby on his behalf, she informed him that Jack Morgan’s auditors were goin
g over the books and were concerned about expenses run up by The North American Indian.
Curtis wrote a long missive to Greene in his defense. The problem was not too much money spent, he said, but too little. J. P. Morgan’s backing had been an excuse for other rich people to decline. He was extremely grateful, mind you, but “the attitude of letting Mr. Morgan do it has been difficult to overcome.” Back in 1906, total costs were projected at $1.5 million. Morgan had contributed an initial $75,000, leaving Curtis to raise more than $1.4 million from subscriptions. If he secured 100 subscriptions a year, in five years he would reach the goal. But he was averaging only 23 a year. More than the money, the work had at times strained him to the breaking point. The North American Indian was not “a pamphlet at six bits,” he raged, but “a real piece of investigation” and “a real book.” The House of Morgan was lucky to have a man of his fortitude. “Few men have been so fortunate as to possess the physical strength I have put in this; and year in and year out I have given to the very maximum of my physical and mental endurance in my effort to make the work a worthy one.”
He closed with a wish to see Belle in person, perhaps socially. She let him know that it was not possible just now to meet face-to-face. As for the future, everything was under review—including the library itself. They would have to wait, both of them, to see what Jack Morgan had in mind for their fate.
Shore of Shoalwater Bay, 1912. Curtis spent more time with Indians of the Northwest Coast than with any other natives. He wanted to capture the essence of daily life in a thick-forested land by the sea.
13. Moving Pictures
1913–1915
THOUGH HIS EARS were bruised by the street sounds of New York City, and his quarters at the Belmont Hotel could not have been more confining, Curtis let his mind drift to the opposite edge of the country, to the seagoing people of the Northwest Coast. Writing Volume IX and sketching his film outline on the Kwakiutl, he wanted to present the wizards of the Pacific shore as some of the most artistically talented people in the world. For everything the Hopi could do weaving yucca strands into basketry, for every geometric pattern the people of Acoma could paint on clay wedding cups, for every dazzling design a Sioux or a Crow could stitch to a buffalo hide stretched around pine poles—it paled in comparison to the communities of the coastal rainforest. Cubist art by the young Pablo Picasso and others was then popular in Paris, works that forced one to see a woman’s nose or an apple in a still life from multiple views. But these Indians had been doing that for centuries: haunted stares locked in cedar, faces of sharp, surreal angles, part human, part wolf, part eagle. A single totem, rising thirty feet, was a log with a life, an elaborate story embedded in the grain.
Without money for fresh field ventures, Curtis rummaged through his past work. He put together everything from his home region and packaged it in New York for the next offering of the book. He would publish the picture of Princess Angeline, taken seventeen years earlier, and a few more from those days, including The Clam Digger, The Mussel Gatherer and Shores of Puget Sound. For this portfolio he added pictures from a 1912 summer sortie to the Olympic Peninsula, the far Washington coast and Vancouver Island. He could have found Indians on the streets of Seattle in that year; some had begun to appear on corners downtown, selling baskets. His brother Asahel took one such picture, a huddled group of Makah: they look like beggars stranded in the urban wild. This seemed a direct slap at the brother who was lost to him, the brother who wanted nothing to do with sad-eyed Salish squatting on sidewalks, hands out.
He kept his focus on people in the half-dozen or more tribes still close to nature in the coastal Northwest. Whereas his previous volume was a picture story of a ferocious river and the people who defied its twists to pull fish from the water, this book would present a more orderly gathering of food from the sea. Their salmon camps, their spreading of nets, the call of a tidal shift twice a day were sedate by comparison with the rock-balancing acts on the Columbia River. He would show bare-breasted women in cedar-root skirts, and many silhouettes against muddied skies. As before, Curtis had an eye for monumental carpentry, revealing the massive, rough-hewn timbers hoisted atop posts in the house and lodge frames of the Cowichan.
In Seattle, Myers shared Curtis’s enthusiasm for the tribes in their backyard. As they mailed drafts back and forth across the country, the cowriters shaped a narrative of people who had very little in common with the Indians of the interior West. This book included songs about a potlatch, a canoe and love. There was an alphabet, as always, and observations on appearance and accessories: “To heighten their beauty as well as to protect the skin from wind and sun, both sexes rubbed on the face a cosmetic compound of grease (preferably kidney fat of the mountain goat).” And Curtis continued to lash out at the historical record of mistreatment. In explaining the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854, he wrote that numerous tribes had given up most of the Puget Sound region in exchange for a couple of parcels totaling four thousand acres—“ludicrously inadequate in area, these lands were for the greater part totally unsuited to the needs of the Indians.”
J. P. Morgan died as the book was going to press. Just days after the funeral, Curtis added a tribute:
IN MEMORY OF MR. J. PIERPONT MORGAN
In the final hour of producing this volume we are saddened and borne down with the loss of the patron who made the work in its full scope possible . . . In this as in all matters with which he was associated he saw the scope; in a measure the magnitude. The fact that he was so able to comprehend this meant the rendering of a service to the world of art and literature of much value. It meant a substantial and comprehensive addition to the documentary knowledge possessed by the human race.
In closing, Curtis vowed to finish the work, essentially daring Morgan’s heir without naming him, and without alluding to his own troubles.
The effort from now until the final volume is written will be for work so strong that there will be an ever-increasing regret that he could not have remained with us until that day when the last chapter is finished.
Curtis was summoned to the House of Morgan barely a week after he wrote that tribute. J. Pierpont “Jack” Morgan Jr. had shown a bit of the collector’s knack of his namesake father, though he was less ostentatious about it. He was a bibliophile too, once boasting of the deal he got on a draft of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair while on a trip to London. The Morgans had been proud enough of the work Curtis had done to date that they gave out volumes as gifts to King Edward VII, the Guildhall Library in London, the Göttingen Library in Germany and numerous museums and book palaces in the United States. But all bets were off after the elder Morgan’s death, and Curtis feared the worst. Young Morgan gave him a firm handshake and asked him to be seated.
“I can well understand your anxiety as to what’s to be done about The North American Indian,” he said, and then got right to the business end of things. He’d been going over the books, and yes, as Belle Greene had indicated, there were questions about how the money was spent and why Curtis was so deep in the hole and behind on the original promise of the schedule. Morgan’s advisers had conducted a lengthy debate about whether to support the project to the end or to cut their losses and call it quits now.
“As a family,” Morgan told Curtis, “we have discussed the matter thoroughly and have decided to finish the undertaking father had in mind.” Relief. But there would be some changes. Morgan money would continue to fund field research—on a limited basis, and only after Curtis submitted detailed proposals, dollar amounts to be decided down the road. Curtis would continue to work without salary or grant. Curtis explained that he had launched his film company, that investors were in hand and that the anticipated profits from In the Land of the Head-Hunters would likely be enough to cover publication of all future volumes. Very well, but there was the ongoing problem of budgeting his time. Curtis was spending far too many days soliciting subscriptions, with little to show for it. From here on out, the Morgan bank would handle more of the bu
siness, to try to limit the hours Curtis had to spend with potential donors. Curtis’s job now was to get back in the field, finish his next volume and do his film.
Although this news did not guarantee financial stability, it at least meant Curtis could pack up his tripod and head out to Indian country once more. He was already thinking beyond the Kwakiutl, to California and its numerous small tribes, to new ventures among the natives of New Mexico, and finally a return to the Hopi. By committing the funds to see the fieldwork through, Jack Morgan had apparently freed Curtis of the humiliating experience of asking rich people to contribute to his life work—for now. Miss Greene would be staying on in her present job as gatekeeper and principal collector of the Morgan Library, per the patriarch’s will, with a bump in salary. She was indispensable.
“Things have cheered up,” Curtis wrote in a quick note to Greene before catching a train headed west.
Out of the sunless canyons of New York and into a theater of green, Curtis joined his crew in British Columbia. George Hunt had found a number of activities to photograph and was well on his way to assembling a cast and building sets for the movie. They would begin shooting in 1914, a year out. Curtis felt renewed. With a fresh bounce in his step, he walked the shore of Vancouver Island, all pulsing tides and overgrowth, more than fifty pounds on his back, and slogged through the rainforest in search of people unaffected by modern life. In one of the wettest parts of the world, the Indians spoke of two broad categories for rain: male and female. “A ‘she rain’ is gentle, caressing, clinging, persistent,” Curtis explained in an extended note to his daughter Florence, one of the many letters to his children that picked up as he entered middle age. “A ‘he rain’ is quite the opposite in all ways but that of persistence.”
