Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

by Timothy Egan

  The natives had long ago figured out how to twine cedar strands into hats, capes and skirts—water-resistant clothing spun from the forest. From the time of George Vancouver’s landing more than century earlier, visitors had been intrigued by people who seemed perfectly comfortable wearing tree bark. By now, though, most of the natives had ditched traditional outerwear for coats from the Hudson’s Bay Company store. When Curtis was paying for a portrait, he asked for the original garment if a family still had one.

  In the fall, Curtis was called back to Seattle to confront another loss, sudden and horrid: Adolph Muhr was found dead. His contribution to The Cause could not be overstated. If a face was particularly radiant, sad, lost, lovely or revealing in a fresh way, it was due in considerable measure to Muhr’s hand in the studio. He had a mortician’s touch for refinishing. The nights of struggle that produced an otherworldly Canyon de Chelly came from the collaboration between the two men. A self-portrait of Curtis the young dandy was actually taken by Muhr in the studio. And he was the link between old-school Indian pictures—done for another one of his employers, Frank A. Rinehart—and those that hang in art galleries. Muhr worked for Curtis from 1904 to 1913, and passed on many of his studio tricks to Imogen Cunningham and Ella McBride. His death was unexpected—a heart attack, apparently—and the reported circumstances were odd. Muhr had been called as a witness of a minor matter in a murder trial. He gave his testimony in the morning, describing the yard of a neighbor who’d been killed. In the afternoon, with court adjourned for the day, Muhr was strolling down the James Street hill with a prosecutor when he commented on the suddenness of his neighbor’s death. “You never can tell just how near you are to eternity,” he said. Half an hour later, Muhr was dead. He was fifty-five.

  Curtis was beside himself. In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his patron and his photo-finishing partner. Muhr’s end came “without an instant’s warning,” Curtis told Hodge. In a brief tribute in Volume X, Curtis wrote: “Death has again entered the ranks of those who have labored on this publication. This time, the call came to Mr. A. F. Muhr, who for so many years gave his excellent service in the photographic laboratory.” The last word was an apt description of all the creative experimentation conducted by Muhr and Curtis in the Seattle space. In Muhr’s place, Curtis promoted McBride, a Curtis acolyte in many endeavors since 1898. She would run the studio. He also brought in as an assistant his daughter Beth, who was seventeen and wanted to learn her father’s business. Curtis stayed in Seattle until year’s end, bunking at the Rainier Club, guiding the transition and preparing to shoot his feature-length film.

  By the spring of 1914, Curtis had spent parts of four seasons studying and photographing the people who would star in his movie. He was impressed by Kwakiutl women. “They retain a fairly pleasing form well past middle age,” he noted. “Women who were grandmothers have unsagging breasts which would be the envy of sub-debs.” The men, not so much: gloomy, like the surroundings—“they seem completely lost in dark broodings.” But as he spent more time with them, Curtis picked up on their sense of humor. He particularly liked how they messed with the minds of missionaries. One day, George Hunt burst into Curtis’s tent with news of a great cultural discovery made by a man of the cloth.

  “What is it?” Curtis asked.

  Hunt fell to the floor in laughter.

  “Tell me!”

  The Kwakiutl had explained to the missionary the meaning of the totem pole figures—a breakthrough for the cleric, or so he thought. “The man at the bottom, the one with the mustache, is the first Spanish explorer,” said Hunt. “Above him, that naked figure, is Adam. The woman is Eve. And the bird at the top represents the Holy Ghost!”

  Curtis loved the inherent drama in the tasks of a Kwakiutl day. A sea lion hunt was fraught with tension, a life-and-death pursuit of one-ton mammals in roiling seas. A funeral in that part of the world could make an Irish wake look sedate, and often lasted three days, with a potlatch as the high point. And those naval warriors in decorated canoes were just the right scene-chewing fodder for a motion-picture camera. Though Curtis wanted to show the Kwakiutl in the time before George Vancouver had sailed up the Strait of Georgia in 1792, he also intended to tell a tight, gripping story. It was mythic and indigenous, one he and Myers had recorded during earlier encounters with the Kwakiutl, but also universal: a journey of a young man in search of love and retribution. The movie would follow Motana, a chief’s son, on a sojourn that could have been taken from the ancient Greeks. Motana loves Naida and intends to marry her. He upsets the spirits one night by thinking of his love during fasting. Now he must act or perish. To placate the gods, he has to kill a whale, and a sea lion, alone. His odyssey draws him into battle with a rival clan of evil headhunters, setting up a daring attack—the climax—and a victory, feasting and celebration, with a big wedding. For good measure, Curtis added a near-tragic twist at the end.

  Because the Kwakiutl of 1914 dressed not unlike the average Canadian whites living in a small coastal town, Curtis and his crew outfitted the Indians in sea otter skirts and cedar bark capes, made at Hunt’s direction by the natives. The movie payroll also produced fresh-carved totems, a fifty-foot war canoe and a range of masks and accessories. Clip-on nose rings and wigs were distributed. A leading man was cast—Motana was played by Hunt’s son, Stanley. Three different Kwakiutl women starred as the love interest, after family members objected mid-filming and pulled one, then another, of the actresses. With Curtis directing, his young aide Schwinke running the camera and Hunt barking out orders translated from English into the native dialect, the shooting began in earnest in late May. Though it was a fictional story, Curtis described his film as a nonfiction saga, an attempt to document (or re-create) what Pacific maritime Indian life was like before white contact. They shot for three months, working every day in the long light of the north.

  “Our activities are such that they should be classified as labor rather than work, but all goes fairly well,” Curtis wrote Hodge on the night of the summer solstice.

  The most difficult shots would be the action scenes at sea, and for that the filmmaker would need cooperative beasts. Curtis purchased a massive, fresh-killed whale from a commercial outfit up the coast, north of Prince Rupert, and had it towed to a Kwakiutl village. The whale worked for his hunt scene, and Curtis was so proud of his trophy prop that he posed in front of its maw of comblike baleen. He looks small by comparison, but the pride shows on his face.

  For the sea lion shots, Curtis, Myers and Stanley Hunt took off for a distant rookery, miles from shore and sheltered harbor. There, the lions, some of them two thousand pounds and up to thirteen feet long, hauled out on a scuff of exposed land called Devil Rock. The crew clambered onto the rock, which Curtis measured at 300 by 500 feet. Curtis marveled at the clack of barking, behemoth lions, the males rounding up their harems, lords of the North Pacific, the smaller females in heat. The trio offloaded packs with cameras, dried food, notebooks, a tent and bedrolls, and Hunt paddled away, planning to pick up the men the next day. They intended to spend a night in order to film the lions at least twice at low tide. The boat had no sooner left than Curtis made a startling discovery: there was no plant life on the island. No ferns, no small shrubs of any sort, no grass, no beach mud. Instead, they found anemones, shallow tidal pools, shiny mussels clinging to wet rock.

  “Do you understand the situation?” asked Myers, some panic in his voice. “There’s no driftwood on this island!”

  Their chart had shown Devil Rock to be forty feet above sea level. And when they landed at low tide, that looked accurate. But it was now clear that this speck of land would be completely submerged at high tide.

  “Yes, Myers. I understand.”

  Either the chart was wrong or they had the wrong island. It was midafternoon. By midnight, in Curtis’s calculation, they would be drowned. The water temperature in that part of the Queen Charlotte Islands is rarely above 40 degrees, even in the warmest months. A person
could live for perhaps thirty minutes before severe hypothermia set in, and then death. Looking around, Curtis could not find a stray log from which to fashion a primitive raft or float. Still, they worked, shooting the sea lions in a boisterous ritual—magnificent footage, never seen onscreen. Then they made for the highest ground and waited. As evening set in, the edge of their temporary island disappeared. They double- and triple-wrapped their cameras. Sunset was late, well past 10 p.m., and the land slipped away faster than the light. Near midnight, the sea was calm but the water completely covered Devil Rock. From where the men stood they saw nothing but the flat gray plane of the Pacific. A light wind picked up, and sea lions flopped about. Spray lashed the men’s faces. The water inched up and over their boots, to the ankles, the knees. The tide had to peak—but when? The fear was that a big breaker would come along and carry them out to sea. They shivered, trading gallows cracks. Deep in the summer night, an hour or so before the first streaks of a new day’s pink appeared in the east, the sea seemed to settle, just below their waists.

  Back in Prince Rupert, the Canadian authorities launched a search party. The great Edward Curtis was long overdue, and thought to be lost in the disorienting fog of the Queen Charlottes. A story went out by telegraph and was picked up by the wire services. The New York Times prepared a lengthy—and largely adulatory—obituary.

  When Hunt arrived in his large canoe in the afternoon, he found a trembling, wet crew of filmmakers and his youngest son, the blood drained from his face. They were battered from stumbling on the slick rock, exhausted from the night and the tension, but otherwise in decent shape. The film had been saved.

  Hunt started laughing. “I knew you were all dead!”

  So did the New York Times. A writer who had interviewed Curtis earlier for a profile had been assigned the obituary. He spent several days on the piece before news came that Curtis had survived. Months later, when the writer saw Curtis in New York, he scolded him.

  “The next time you drown,” he told Curtis, “please stay drowned.”

  They shot 112 scenes in all, enough footage to edit down to six reels, about an hour. By the close of July, Curtis had his film, including the battle scenes, clashes between clans using spears and wooden clubs. At the same time, the muscle-flexing monarchies of Old Europe and the ossified rulers of the Ottoman Empire were rumbling into war. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, on June 29, 1914, was the first ripple. Soon, four of the world’s great empires would be drawn into close-range carnage with ghastly industrial weapons, a war that would end in the collapse of two of them. For Curtis, happy to be finishing In the Land of the Head-Hunters, the guns of the Great War could not have been farther away. He called it a wrap and set sail for Seattle on the Elsie Allen.

  The film opened in New York and Seattle in December of 1914. The editing had been exhausting, much more so than Curtis had expected, plus he had color-tinted scenes for added effect, a time-sucking task. Curtis missed Muhr—his judgment, his sharp eye, his work ethic. But he still had Myers, and gave him grateful credit when he applied the finishing touches to Volume X that winter, while balancing film and writing duty. “Mr. W. E. Myers, who has been so long identified with The North American Indian, has done his best work here, and to his valuable collaboration much of the success of this volume is due.” Curtis sent a note to subscribers, with some self-congratulation at having reached the halfway point of the twenty volumes.

  At the film’s premiere, Curtis employed an orchestra that played a score composed by John J. Braham, who was known for his work with Gilbert and Sullivan. Braham had worked from wax cylinder recordings of Kwakiutl songs brought back by Curtis. The movie posters showed giant carved raven heads swallowing a nearly naked man; it looked like early 3D, promised “Eight thousand feet of tinted pictures by the world’s master photographer!” Handbills proclaimed, “Every participant an Indian and every incident true to native life.” A tag line on one poster read:

  AN ABORIGINAL ROMANCE

  EDWARD CURTIS’S WONDERFUL

  INDIAN PHOTO DRAMA

  The movie was a smash—with the critics. “A gem of the motion picture art,” wrote W. Stephen Bush, a prominent early film writer. “Mr. Curtis has found the short cut of genius and he eminently succeeds where others have dismally failed.” He added, “I speak advisedly when I say that this production sets a new mark in artistic handling of films in which education values mingle with dramatic interest . . . It is not a feature for the nickelodeon or the cheap house, but it ought to be welcomed by the better class of houses . . . that want to give their patrons a special treat.” The poet Vachel Lindsay, writing in a book on the value of film, praised Curtis for “a supreme art achievement” and gave him credit for breaking ground on a number of fronts—location shooting, story, native cast. Even the scholars weighed in with positive notices. “The settings, costumes and the incidents themselves were also ethnologically correct and the dramatic interest of the play was well-sustained,” wrote Alanson Skinner, of the American Museum of Natural History, in a note to Curtis. “I think you have succeeded in making ethnology come alive.” At the initial showings at the Casino Theatre in New York—tickets 25 cents for a matinee, 50 cents for an evening show—crowds gave the film standing ovations. Audiences particularly liked the sea lion scene shot on Devil Rock. The New York Times praised a story told “entirely from the Indian viewpoint” and marveled at the tinted scenes, crediting Curtis with a real advance in motion-picture art by creating “new color systems.” At the Moore Theatre in Seattle, reaction was equally strong. “A powerful, gripping story,” wrote the critic for the Post-Intelligencer. “A genuine sensation.” The show business trade paper Variety could not get over the realism, and was astonished that every actor in the film was “a genuine American Indian.” (Though in fact they were Canadian Indians.)

  In production, the film had gone over budget; the total cost was in excess of $75,000—no surprise, given the maker. A weeklong run in a half-dozen cities had grossed $3,269—not disastrous, but not promising either. But a dispute with a distributor over who would pay to get the movie into wide release put it in limbo. The film was pulled, pending litigation. Curtis could not believe it. He’d produced another masterpiece, as it was called, and nobody was going to see it. Would it rot in a basement, all that action, the world’s first in a class? The investors who’d been promised sizable returns raised a caterwaul. Curtis could not sleep, could not eat. He paced his room at the Belmont and burned up phone and telegraph lines in the city. He filed suit against the distributor, claiming it had broken their agreement. But the suit was slow to get anywhere. Meanwhile, the courts held In the Land of the Head-Hunters hostage.

  “I am sparring for my life and gasping for breath and at the same time working so hard that I am worn to more than the old time thin edge,” Curtis wrote Hodge.

  Eight years after In the Land of the Head-Hunters had opened and mysteriously vanished, a silent film titled Nanook of the North—A Story of Love and Life in the Actual Arctic was released in theaters around the world. Its director, Robert Flaherty, had studied the Curtis movie frame by frame and spent an afternoon with the Shadow Catcher, asking him about his methods, his location ideas, how to work with native people. Flaherty had tried to do a film on Eskimos at the same time that Curtis was finishing Head-Hunters, and his earlier effort was pedestrian. As a professional courtesy, Curtis explained how he built sets based on native models, hired only Indian actors and generally tried to create a lost world in an authentic way. When Flaherty set out to make Nanook, he followed the Curtis model. The film was shot near Hudson’s Bay. Igloos were built. Costumes from the old days were made fresh for the film. Scenes showed traditional hunting, hut-making and meat-drying, and included a thrilling sequence with Nanook hunting seals by spear. The Flaherty film was a huge success, and he was credited with making the first feature-length documentary.

  Two years later, in 1924, Curtis sold all rights to his film to the American
Museum of Natural History for $1,500 and shipped the master print and negative to New York. The litigation had never been settled; the case had died in court. The film was bound for a vault in the museum; it was an artifact, a forgotten one at that.

  Curtis with a whale carcass on the Pacific shore, date unknown. This shot was probably taken during the filming of Curtis’s In the Land of the Head-Hunters.

  Masked dancers in a canoe, a still from the movie, 1914. Recent historians have credited Curtis with a breakthrough film—shot entirely on location, using an all-native cast—that was largely forgotten for much of the twentieth century.

  Wedding party, 1914. Another still from the film, in which Curtis sought to re-create a mythic story of the Kwakiutl.

  14. Lost Days

  1916–1922

  IN THE GOOD YEARS, when she was Clara the bright, she alone shared his idea to accomplish something great and lasting, and she alone assured him he could do it. His passion was for her before it was for images on platinum. He wrote hundreds of letters to her in those days of struggle, sharing his doubts, living the Big Idea in words. Clara had saved the letters, her children explained later, because they made her feel close to him at times when she didn’t know where he was or what tribe he was with, and because it reminded her of what she loved, and because—yes, he was a genius, damnit. Look at how he agonized. Consider the torture, on body and mind. And here and there, some sweet touches. But Clara Curtis eventually destroyed the letters, as family lore has it, leaving behind very little from the days when they were one. What lives beyond her years, the lasting words, come from a pad of court documents in Seattle, divorce case number 118324 in King County, the first filing on October 6, 1916. Here she makes the legal claims that stab at a marriage when it is down and already dead. Here she goes public with a view of a man no one would like.