by Timothy Egan
Curtis described a Cheyenne, age forty-eight, educated at the Carlisle School Upshaw had attended, who became a drunk. He deserted his family, quit his job at a hospital, was run over by a wagon. He eventually found salvation and sobriety in the spiritual disciplines of the Peyote Society. “Within a few years of joining the peyote organization he has become one of the most substantial men of the tribe.” Curtis ripped into the government for harassing Indians who sought to connect with their past in this way. “Worshipers have been arrested, indicted, and tried in state courts.” But since Indians were now citizens, they should be protected by the First Amendment—the peyote cult, he wrote, was the Native American church.
With the Alaska volume, Curtis was magnificent, bringing home a book as original, humane and surprising as his best work on the Hopi or the Nez Perce. The exuberance of his handwritten log fully carried over to the typeset pages and printed images of the final book. What made the Eskimos—except for those ravaged by the flu epidemic on Little Diomede Island—so different from the Indians Curtis had visited over the past thirty years was that they’d escaped the worst curse of the West, those genocidal diseases. For most of North America, the devastation was consistent, Curtis wrote, from the Southwest to the Northwest, from the California coast to the Great Plains. “A notable exception was found in the natives of Nunivak Island, whose almost total freedom from Caucasian contact has thus far been their salvation,” he wrote. “In all the author’s experience among Indians and Eskimos, he never knew a happier and more thoroughly honest and self-reliant people.” Curtis put the number of Alaska natives at 12,405—a healthy population. He described how they made parkas from bird or fish skins, and heavier coats of caribou and bear hide. Their socks were woven grass; a rain slicker was fashioned from seal intestine. The people were tattooed and pierced and handsome—as his pictures showed—save for that dirty community of Hooper Bay. He was as harsh toward them in the book as he was in his diary. “Uncleanliness of person and possessions is the rule; the floors of dwellings are deep in filth and refuse of every description.” Most of the pictures are portraits of delight: laughing children in duck-skin parkas, alluring women in the angled light of midnight, limber young men launching boats for a whale hunt. He was so intrigued by the design of kayaks that he included illustrations of how they were built. And the songs: parts of the final volume can seem like the outline of a musical.
In a brief introduction, Curtis was grateful to those who believed in him through the years, the people “who never lost faith,” named and unnamed. “Mere thanks seem hollow in comparison with such loyal cooperation; but great is the satisfaction the writer enjoys when he can at last say to all those whose faith has been unbounded, ‘It is finished.’”
Curtis told a friend that he still held out hope of selling a couple of subscriptions, and with that money he could start something fresh. He was interested in the history of gold, and in further travel. He was sixty-one years old when he finished Volume XX in 1929, and he thought there was another act or two ahead for himself. Hodge was happy with the polished draft. But as they put the closing touches on the last words and pictures of The North American Indian, the nation took a turbulent turn. On October 29, the stock market crashed, the worst single day on Wall Street to that point. And the bottom was not around the corner; over the next three weeks, the market lost 40 percent of its value. Though less than 5 percent of Americans owned stock, the crash had a downward-spiraling effect on confidence, and it gutted thousands of banks holding the life savings of average people—money bet and lost in the market in a deregulatory free fall. By year’s end, unemployment had tripled. Universities, museums, the rich: nobody was immune from the crash.
When the final volume of the Indian work had been printed in 1930, Curtis faced the only thing worse than a bad review: silence. He longed for a word or two from the papers that had once given full pages to him. His own personal collapse came two years earlier than the nation’s, starting on the day he was thrown in jail. That he had completed the work at all was astounding to those closest to him. After he finished the thirty-year, twenty-set book, the only comment from Curtis to his editor was cursory. “I am in bad shape again,” he wrote Hodge in a hand-scrawled note on lined paper that looked like the scribbling of a child. “Going from my bed to my working table is about my limit at present.”
Curtis moved to Denver and checked into a long-term-care hospital, as a charity case. He withdrew from the central figures of his life for almost two years, though he did dash off notes to his children. Then, in early 1932, he reached out to the two constants over the course of his magnum opus: Edmond Meany and Belle da Costa Greene. To Meany, stalwart companion for three decades, who was tolerant of his silent spells and his lapses in meeting the basic responsibilities of friendship, he told of the pain and pathos that had visited him, and lamented that he was already a forgotten man. Meany, writing back, relayed news of his own troubles: he’d been in a terrible car accident, tearing up his knee. He could no longer hike, and could not walk without a cane. He assured Curtis that his work would grow in stature with the years: “The last two volumes of your monumental work have caused distinct revival here of talk about you . . . I can sympathize with your last sentence about feeling ‘a bit lost.’ You can rest assured that you and your books will be rediscovered through centuries of time.”
Meany was being kind. If there was talk in Seattle of a Curtis revival, it was limited to a very small circle. In closing, he compared Curtis to other artists who had been broke, sick and depressed: “Unfortunately, this has too often been the fate of other great achievers in the realm of music, art, books and explorations. Belated honors are vicarious compensations.”
The letter to Greene was blunt and needy, Curtis confiding in her as he did in Meany. She held all the power now at the Morgan Library, where she reigned as the director with full backing of the board of trustees.
My Dear Miss Greene:
Much water has passed beneath all bridges since we last exchanged a word or letter. It is years since I have been in New York . . . How many times have I wished that Mr. Morgan might have lived to see completion of the work and know something of its standing as a completed undertaking . . . Following my season in the Arctic collecting final material for Volume Twenty, I suffered a complete physical breakdown. For two years, I was about a 99 percent loss. Ill health and uncertainty as to how I was to solve the problem of the future brought a period of depression which about crushed me . . . I am again in a measure physically fit and have much of my old courage back. During the long months of despondency I could not write to my friends; no one wants to listen to the wail of lost souls, or to the down and outers.
He was right on the last point. Greene and the Morgan Library had lost interest in the man who had once been their most famous living beneficiary. Curtis had closed with a simple request: “I am again writing and hoping I may do something worthwhile. Do drop me a line; even a word from my old friends gives added courage.” She did not bother with a reply.
Belle da Costa Greene filed the letter away with the other papers, and thousands of pictures, in the Curtis trove—darkened, covered, closed. As it turned out, the Indians that Curtis spent his adult life documenting had never faded away. It was The North American Indian that disappeared.
Wilbur Peebo—Comanche, 1927. In the state once designated as the official Indian Territory for displaced tribes, Curtis was hard-pressed to find natives living by the old ways. In a concession to modernity, he shot Peebo, of the once fearsome Comanche, in dress shirt and short hair.
18. Twilight
1932–1952
IN THE SUMMER OF 1948, the Seattle Historical Society asked a retired librarian named Harriet Leitch to assess a set of books that had just been donated by a wealthy widow, Sophie Frye Bass. The history buffs were not sure of their value, or what to make of them. The acquisition was not a complete set, just eight volumes. Still, they were luminous, these large-format books and fol
ios of silky vellum, the pictures bringing their Indian subjects to life.
For Leitch, it was like finding the Seven Cities of Cibola. A beloved figure, once voted Librarian of the Year by her colleagues, she had certainly heard about The North American Indian, though sightings were rare. There were perhaps only five of the fully bound twenty-volume sets in Seattle. One was at the city’s main library, another at the University of Washington, residing at last in its logical home after Professor Meany’s ceaseless work to convince the school of its merit. A third was listed as belonging to Colonel Alden Blethen, the Seattle Times publisher who had died more than three decades earlier. A fourth was held by the Stimson family, who’d made a fortune in timber and was now building a broadcast empire. And the eccentric railroad man Samuel Hill was a subscriber during his time in Seattle.
As Leitch ran her fingers over the fine photogravures, the handset letterpress text printed on heavy stock, the leather binding and gilt edging, and gazed into the eyes of people who looked as if they sprang from some musty American storage chest, she wondered what had become of the architect of this exquisite construction of biblio-art. The last entry in the Seattle Public Library’s clipping file was from 1927, when Curtis was jailed and hauled before a judge. The family had disappeared. No one was left in the region. She found a contact for Beth, who was still running a Curtis studio on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Leitch wrote and explained her current task, with a few basic queries:
Is Edward S. Curtis still alive?
If so, could he answer some questions by correspondence?
What had become of The North American Indian?
Married for more than twenty years, Beth was selling prints of Curtis Indians, supplementing her husband’s work as a portrait photographer. Her father resided not far from the studio, in a small apartment on Saturn Street. The address, just a few blocks from Beverly Hills, belied his living conditions: Curtis hated the place. It was confining, in a neighborhood crawling with poseurs and choked by bad air. Whenever he stepped outside, he gasped at the yellow smog; some days it was so bad he could not see the few miles to Hollywood Hills. At eighty, his hands were bent and gnarled by arthritis, he could barely walk, and he was going blind. Despite all of that, he felt fairly spry, a late-life vigor that he attributed to herbal tea from a plant in Oregon that he’d been drinking for years. And, in an effort to hold on to his eyesight, he ate a pound of carrots every day.
“Mr. Curtis is elderly,” Beth wrote Leitch in late August, “but very much alive. I know he would be delighted to give you any information you might like concerning his life.”
For a librarian, accustomed to dealing with voices from a muted assemblage of filed books, this news was a jolt of discovery, on par with leafing through The North American Indian for the first time. She wrote Curtis immediately, and thereafter kept up a string of inquiries. In her first letter, she explained how the eight volumes had come into the hands of the historical society, and she seemed somewhat embarrassed to admit that few people knew of their significance. Though, of course, she was not one of them. “It seems to me that your important and valuable work should be brought to the attention of the present residents of Seattle.”
In reply, Curtis wrote in jittery, jagged cursive, for which he apologized, “I can’t afford a typist.” He said he’d been in and out of the hospital for the past year and was now bivouacked in the Saturn Street apartment, which felt like a cell. A nurse made regular visits to assist him.
“In other words,” wrote the Shadow Catcher, “I am a shut in.”
He would be happy to tell about his life, but first, a request: “Should you contact any of my old friends, please tell them I’m still alive and expect to be hanging around for at least five years more.” There was plenty of swagger yet in the old boy.
He had started planning a new life in 1932, after leaving the hospital in Denver. “Yes I am certainly broke,” he told Meany then, a condition that matched the financial state of the country. “Other than that, I am not down and out.” Harold, his only son, had moved west, and was interested in mining. So was Curtis. His long stay in the Rockies had fired a passion for gold. He thought there might be a book on the subject for him, and along the way, maybe a strike or two of the precious metal. In studying the various methods for extracting gold dust, Curtis found them wanting. This void produced an invention: the Curtis Counter Current Concentrator, which he had patented. It was a device that looked like a short conveyor belt on an angled ironing board, used to separate flour-fine particles of gold from the detritus of abandoned placer mines. With his confidence restored and his clumsy invention in hand, the sixty-something Curtis charged into the mountains of California and Colorado, as fevered for gold as the Klondike prospectors he had disparaged in his youth.
In October of that year, Clara Curtis climbed into a rowboat near her sister’s home in Bremerton, on Puget Sound. In the chop of a sudden breeze, she fell overboard, into the 42-degree waters, and drowned. That was the official story. Clara was fifty-eight years old. Her obituary in the Seattle Times was three paragraphs.
RITES ARRANGED FOR MRS. CURTIS, SOCIAL LEADER
There was no mention of her famous ex-husband, no mention of the years she’d toiled without notice at one of the world’s best-known picture shops. Her membership in several local organizations was recounted, highlighted by her presidency of the Women’s Commercial Club. And one more thing: “She operated a photographic studio here several years ago.”
With the death of Clara, the last Curtis child left in Seattle, twenty-three-year-old Katherine—called Billy—moved to southern California to be closer to the family. “The three oldest children had basically disowned their mother,” said Jim Graybill, the son of Florence. Katherine, not unlike her older sister Beth, had been a victim of her mother’s rage and instability as the marriage fell apart and she scrimped to pay the bills. Growing up, she never knew her absentee father. Through all those years on the road, Curtis had written her. Some of the letters were fanciful, others full of Indian stories from one reservation or another. But Katherine never saw those personal notes until much later, when they were discovered in an old suitcase. Her mother had hidden them from her. With Katherine’s move, Curtis now had two daughters and his son nearby, and a fourth child in Oregon.
Curtis kicked around many a goldfield, scraping high mountain ground in the Sierra Nevada until dark, the Curtis Concentrator grinding away. He wrote loving, imaginative letters to his grandson Jim, often assuming the point of view of a cat, signing those letters with an inky paw print. And he wrote ruminative, serious ones to Meany. After crawling out of the basement of his depression, Curtis dashed off a forward-looking update to Meany, gossipy and full of plans. He mentioned that his editor Hodge had moved to Los Angeles, having taken up professional residence among the Indian artifacts at the Southwest Museum, with its great hillside perch. And after much sleuthing, he had found Myers at last, living in an apartment in the Bay Area, working as a company secretary at a soft-drink factory. Curtis was writing again, he reported, though nothing an academic would appreciate. “I am tired of being formal,” he told Meany. Most books, he observed as an aside, are not worth the paper they are printed on. So many writers, so many books, and yet what was the value of being published? The joy was in creation, in the act of doing, in discovery. Rejection is not such a bad thing.
Writing to Meany with his newfound breeziness, Curtis hinted that he might have taken several lovers over the course of his life, though he was discreet and named no names—simply a justification. “We all know that from the earliest days of man to today, man’s natural inclination was and is to indulge in sexual wandering.” This was telling, and perhaps confessional. A lifetime of correspondence ended on that note, in August 1934.
Barely six months later, while preparing for his morning class at the University of Washington, Meany fell to the ground and gasped for breath, in the grip of a titanic stroke. The professor died in his office, ag
e seventy-two. Meany was one of the last of the early Pacific Northwest Renaissance men. He’d arrived in Seattle when it was a sodden village of tree stumps and prostitutes, mud running down the streets, oyster pirates sneaking in and out of Elliott Bay. In his time, he had been a newspaper carrier and a newspaper publisher. He’d written scholarly books and short, punchy popular essays. He was one of the first to see the value in native people living camouflaged lives in the midst of a fast-changing region—Indians with a living link to a faraway world, and a culture that the new residents couldn’t begin to fathom. Along with his lectures on forestry, Indians and history, with his political work that established a new campus for the University of Washington and a world’s fair for a young city, he had climbed most of the mountains in the American far corner. A campus hall, a Seattle hotel, a ski lodge and a mountain crest joined to Rainier were all named for him. It was little known until much later that he’d been the soul mate and best friend of Edward Curtis for almost forty years. From the audacity of the original Indian idea, to the college football game with the aging Chief Joseph, to days when Curtis dined at the table of a president, to the midnight blackness of late-middle-aged despair, Ed Meany kept the Shadow Catcher going, always certain of his genius.
In the trough of the Depression, Curtis was living hand to mouth. The economy showed no signs of improving—indeed, it had grown worse, after fiscal belt-tightening in Washington shrank government payrolls that had given a lift to so many towns. And so when Cecil B. DeMille called in 1936 with an offer, Curtis sold his gold concentrator and once again took up the camera. The great director was shooting a big-budget western featuring the most glamorous stars of the day, Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. It was an Indian story, in its way, taking place in the Badlands, with cameo appearances by historical characters like George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody. DeMille planned to shoot it on location in Montana and the Dakotas, and could use Curtis’s help with photographic stills, camera work and logistics. Had Curtis finished up with that Indian business of his?
