by Timothy Egan
What Kernberger discovered was a mother lode: more than 200,000 photogravures and the priceless copper gravure plates that Curtis had used to publish his magnum opus. Over the years, a handful of prints and gravures had trickled onto the market. Some came from among the 272 bound sets of The North American Indian that had been sold by subscription and Lauriat’s later efforts. Many of these had been picked apart—that is, the volumes were broken up and the gravures offered piecemeal. But all of this material was nothing compared to what was in the bookstore’s basement.
Back in New Mexico, Kernberger talked a few friends and investors into joining him, and together they purchased the lot from Lauriat’s and moved it to Santa Fe. Their gallery shows were mobbed. The Morgan Library had a similar reception when it gave a big public exhibition of some Curtis material that it had had in storage for decades. Reprints, lithographs and gravures circulated widely in galleries, and coffee-table books for the art market appeared. Eventually Kernberger’s group sold the master copper plates, which then passed through several more hands before settling in the current home of a pair of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
When a collector in Austin, Texas, named Lois Flury saw her first Curtis pictures in the early 1970s, it changed the course of her life. “The work was very moving,” she said. “I thought it was wonderful, fabulous, original and so different from contemporary art photographs.” She purchased several gravures. Flury and her husband eventually moved to Seattle, where they opened a gallery devoted to the work of Curtis, a few blocks from the studio where Princess Angeline was charmed by a dashing young man. As the new gallery opened, the last Curtis studio aide died; Imogen Cunningham was ninety-three. She had refined a style that made her one of the best-known picture artists of the day, celebrated, alongside Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, as a giant in her field. Another acolyte, Ella McBride, had continued to climb mountains and pursue those perfect moments of a photographer’s art through much of the twentieth century. After opening her own studio in Seattle, she became internationally famous for her floral pictures, particularly in Japan. McBride died in 1965, two months shy of her 103rd birthday. In old age Curtis had said, “She was my star.”
In the forty years following the discovery in Lauriat’s basement, the value of all work by Curtis has steadily risen. A single photogravure of Chief Joseph, for example, sold for $169,000 in 2010. A full set of the bound twenty volumes is exceedingly difficult to find; they rarely change hands. Most are held by institutions—universities and libraries in Europe and the United States. About every five years one will come up for auction. In 2005, a set sold at Christie’s for $1.4 million, “a new record for a photographic lot,” as Artnet.com reported. A partial set of sixteen volumes sold for more than $1 million at a Swann’s auction in 2007. It was one of the highest prices paid for a book that year, following such items as the Magna Carta and J. K. Rowling’s handwritten manuscript of a Harry Potter book. A private sale in 2009, at the time of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, brought the highest price yet for a single Curtis set—$1.8 million.
Flury came to know three of the surviving Curtis children, and found them full of fond memories of their father, the Shadow Catcher. She was informed of the books that Curtis had kept and then passed on to Beth. After Beth died in 1973, the family set of The North American Indian went to Manford Magnuson, her husband. Another child, Florence Curtis Graybill, who spent that memorable summer in California with her father in 1922 and later talked him into writing and recording bits of his life story, died in 1987, at the age of eighty-eight. The oldest, Harold Phillips Curtis, outlived all his siblings: he passed away in 1988, at the age of ninety-five. Flury was concerned, as was Magnuson, that the family set might be broken up and sold in parts after the children’s generation had passed. Just before Magnuson’s death in 1993, Flury found a buyer: the Rare Books Library at the University of Oregon.
“So that’s where the Curtis family set is now—a good home at the University of Oregon,” she told me. Hardly a week goes by when Flury doesn’t run into someone at her gallery whose view of Indians was changed by looking into faces frozen by Curtis’s camera. “For posterity,” she said, “he has given us images of who they really were.”
This view is shared by many natives. After purchasing an original edition of Volume XII, devoted entirely to the Hopi, that tribe used the book to build and solidify its teachings, traditions and language. The Hopi found the alphabet and the accompanying song lyrics crucial tools in teaching words that nearly disappeared. When I visited them in the summer of 2011, tribal leaders talked about an ongoing renaissance of the old ways: in schools, among community groups, on websites and through social networks, and said that nearly half of all members of the Hopi Nation in Arizona can now speak some of the language.
Similarly, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma uses smartphones and tablet computers to teach a language that is now widely known by young tribal members. In Montana, Carol Murray, director of the Tribal History Project at Blackfeet Community College, found that Curtis pictures of her people were a good way to connect students to their ancestors. Murray has a special attachment to the images: she’s a descendant of several subjects. At Canyon de Chelly, now a protected monument run jointly by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation, and staffed mostly by native people, Curtis’s photograph of the valley floor is on prominent display at the visitor center. When the Makah of the far northwestern shore set out to revive whale hunting in 1999 as a bridge to their past, they had trouble finding anyone alive with memory of the practice. They relied on pictures by both Curtis brothers, and the text from Volume XI, as a guide to reconstructing the ritual of the hunt. Starting in 1988, and every summer thereafter, Coast Salish tribes from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to southern Puget Sound have taken to the water to paddle from one Indian homeland to the other. To replicate the original cedar vessels for their first summer sea journey, they relied on Curtis’s photos and the war canoes in his 1914 Head-Hunters movie. During Washington State’s centennial celebration in 1989, the Seattle Times’s art critic Delores Tarzan Ament said that the twenty-volume work of Edward Curtis is to photography what Wagner’s Ring Cycle is to opera—a view shared by museum curators and scholars of art and native studies.
Yet modern appreciation of Curtis by critics and in Indian country, and the rise in financial value of his photography throughout the world, did prompt an inevitable backlash. Starting in the 1980s, a handful of academics and revisionists complained that Curtis’s subjects were not authentic, that he had posed them and sometimes asked them to change from their everyday overalls and collared shirts into buckskin leggings and war bonnets. They said Curtis dwelled too much on the past. Where were the pictures of hunger and privation on the reservation? Why not show Indians in school or an office? Why not show them receiving handouts? Curtis had heard these objections during his lifetime, and he pled guilty to all—with a shrug. His goal was to capture native people as they were before their cultures were too diluted. For more than thirty years his main concern and competitor in this project was time itself. As he said often, every day meant the passing of some person who held knowledge that might disappear entirely. Near the end, he feared that most of the Indian world would eventually look as Oklahoma did to him in the 1920s—a people utterly remade by others.
“Many of them are not only willing but anxious to help,” he told the New York Times in 1911. “They have grasped the idea that this is to be a permanent memorial of their race, and it appeals to their imagination. Word passes from tribe to tribe about it. A tribe that I have visited and studied lets another tribe know that after the present generation has passed away men will know from this record what they were like and what they did, and the second tribe does not want to be left out.” As for the posing—yes, he never denied staging some things. Many ceremonies, from the Sun Dance of the Piegan to the Snake Dance of the Hopi, were photographed as they were, in real time, with Curtis doing no
thing to influence them. Others were done for his camera. But in those cases, it took months, sometimes years, working with Indian interpreters such as Alexander Upshaw to validate a story before he would use it or photograph an illustration of it. “Indians delight in stringing people along . . . and filling them with ridiculous stories,” Curtis said in that Times profile. One reason why his project took so long to complete, requiring visit after visit, year after year, to the same tribes, was because of Curtis’s oft-stated mission to get it right. “In dealing with Indians, grandstand plays should be avoided,” he said. “One must be just simple, just quiet and as unostentatious as possible. Keep your dignity and stand on it. Make friends with the dogs.”
Beyond the discussion of whether the bulk of his work is documentary or art or some combination, his best illustrations defy categories and connect with the heart.
The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, had just finished writing a story taken from his ancestors’ oral tradition when he saw a Curtis picture of Plains Indians on horseback dragging a travaux. “It struck me with such force that it brought tears to my eyes,” he wrote in Sacred Legacy, a book of Curtis pictures published in 2000. “I felt that I was looking into a memory in my blood. Here was a moment lost in time, a moment I had known only in my imagination, suddenly verified, an image immediately translated from the mind’s eye to the picture plane.” He summarized the photographer’s output this way: “Taken as a whole, the work of Edward Curtis is a singular achievement. Never before have we seen the Indians of North America so close to the origins of their humanity, their sense of themselves in the world, their innate dignity and self-possession.”
I heard this kind of praise in much of the Indian country I visited over the course of researching this book. I traveled to nearly every tribal homeland that Curtis had gone to for The North American Indian. People were effusive about the pictures themselves, with good reason: Curtis took more than 40,000 of them. But he also recorded those 10,000 songs, wrote down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages, and transcribed an incalculable number of myths, rituals and religious stories from oral histories. Only in recent years has the scope and depth of Curtis’s scholarship come to be appreciated. The North American Indian, the monumental work of a self-educated man, “almost certainly constitutes the largest anthropological enterprise ever undertaken,” noted Mick Gidley, a professor of American literature who has written extensively about Curtis.
Perhaps that is an overstatement, but not by much. Also, Curtis was the first person to conduct a thorough historical autopsy of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, from both the Indian side and that of the cavalry. His work was eyewitness history, taken from survivors of the battle. Under pressure from Custer’s widow, Libbie, who lived to be ninety-one, and following the concerns expressed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Curtis had held back on his most explosive revelations. But these insights are now available in a bound volume at the Library of Congress, and have proven to be an invaluable resource for modern historians. In his 2010 book on the battle, Nathaniel Philbrick credits Curtis for seeking out so many witnesses, and generally sides with Curtis’s view of the battle.
In the Land of the Head-Hunters, a source of so much heartbreak for Curtis, has undergone a similar revival. After being pulled from theaters because of legal disputes, it vanished for thirty-three years. Curtis had sold all rights, and given away the master print, for a pittance. In the late 1940s, the Field Museum in Chicago came into possession of the scratched, corroded and faded movie. When it was screened, the nitrate film caught fire, forcing an evacuation. The flames were doused, but not without further damage. In 1973, the art historian Bill Holm, an expert on Coast Salish culture, and the anthropologist George Quimby, who had worked on the film in Chicago, released a restored and restructured version, titled In the Land of the War Canoes. They had spent seven years putting the film back together. It was praised as a landmark, and given its due for documentary realism and for the pioneering use of an all-Indian cast. Curtis “took considerable artistic license,” a University of British Columbia scholar told film critic William Arnold in 2008, but he “got most things right.” In particular, he lauded Curtis for filming ceremonies that were outlawed by the potlatch prohibition laws, which were not repealed until 1951. On a spring evening in 2008, a restored version of the film made a second debut, and proved to be a highlight of the Seattle International Film Festival. It was shown at the Moore Theatre, where Curtis had copremiered it back in 1914. The cleaned-up film was presented with a live performance of its original orchestral score and a dance recital by Indian descendants of the cast. Today the movie is held by the Library of Congress, part of its National Film Registry, where it is recognized for its “cultural, historic and aesthetic” value.
The most significant revival, and one that would probably have surprised Curtis, has been among Indians themselves. The 2010 census counted 2.7 million Native Americans, just under 1 percent of the population and up 18 percent in a decade. This figure includes only those who listed themselves as “Indian alone,” not of mixed blood. What stopped the downward slide in population was better health and vaccinations; eventually the white man’s diseases that had wiped out so many Indians had run their course.
The Tulalip, north of Seattle, where Curtis took some of his first Indian pictures, have 2,500 members living, as before, on the shores of the inland sea. With its casino just off Interstate 5, the tribe has grown very wealthy. They just opened a $19 million, 23,000-square-foot cultural center. Inside, one of the first things to greet visitors is an enormous hanging of a picture Curtis took in 1913, called Evening on Puget Sound.
Some of the smallest tribes have not fared so well. The Duwamish, Princess Angeline’s people, were declared to be extinct by the United States government in 1916. Some surviving Duwamish have long taken issue with that judgment and have tried for decades to gain official recognition. In 2008, members of the tribe—including Cecile Hansen, the great-great-grandniece of Chief Seattle—opened a cedar longhouse near their traditional home by the Duwamish River. At the other end of the population spectrum, the Navajo now number more than a quarter-million people on a reservation that is larger than all but ten of the states. With passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which extended First Amendment protection of faith to native rites, people are free to worship the gods of their ancestors in the canyons and mesas where Curtis found them a century ago, diminished but unbowed.
Though Edward Curtis never made a dime producing what was arguably the most expansive and comprehensive publication undertaken by a single citizen of the United States, though he went to his death without the acknowledgment he so wanted in life, and though he paid for his obsession with the loss of friends, a marriage and the irreplaceable hours of watching a family bloom, he always believed his words and pictures would come to life long after he’d passed—the artist’s lasting reward of immortality. A young man with an unlived-in face found his calling in the faces of a continent’s forgotten people, and in so doing, he not only saw history, but made it.
Acknowledgments
Anybody who thinks writing is entirely a solitary endeavor has never tried to bring a book along from its formative idea to pixels and pages. The village of helpers, healers and mentors is large. I’ve been lucky, as was my fellow Seattleite Edward Curtis, to live in a city that nurtures writers. I could not write in a good climate. In gratitude, I start at the top from Seattle: thanks to my wife, Joni Balter, who always gets the first look at my ragged prose. This time around I benefited enormously from sharp critiques by some very good reader-editors—Sam Howe Verhovek, Barbara Winslow Boardman and Sophie Egan. Despite my pestering, they remain good friends, and in the last case a daughter who isn’t afraid to tell her dad when his stuff needs help. The Allen Library at the University of Washington is home to thousands of Curtis documents, letters and photos; thanks to the staff for their di
ligence in keeping these archives in great condition, and for their help in tracking down the relevant material. It’s a great treasure, especially the papers of Edmond S. Meany, Curtis’s pal and university pioneer. And I found wonderful material in the Seattle Room, a comprehensive collection of all things related to the city’s story, on a top floor of the glass masterpiece of the Seattle Public Library.
Also in Seattle, the Rainier Club opened its doors to me in many ways, providing access not just to their Curtis pictures, which appear in every nook and cranny, but to the many portraits Curtis took of members. The club has been enthusiastic and helpful in this project from the beginning. My guide there was Russell Johanson, a rare books collector. And Marie McCaffrey, a Rainier member whose late husband, Walt Crowley, wrote a history of the club, opened the way there, and was an early and passionate supporter of the project. In addition, she is the cofounder and executive director of HistoryLink.org, an invaluable digital service for lovers of the Pacific Northwest past. The longtime keeper of the Curtis flame in Seattle is Lois Flury. For more than thirty years, her Flury and Company gallery in Pioneer Square has given display space to many of the Shadow Catcher’s masterpieces. Lois helped on many fronts. John Forsen, filmmaker and winemaker, was key in leading me back to the Seattle world’s fair of 1909, where Curtis was on display for the world. Three other Seattleites deserve thanks: Dr. John Gayman, for many a ruminative run (and free medical advice) during the book’s long winter; Casey Egan, for issuing a challenge to make it at least as interesting as an iPhone app; and Mike Heinrich, winner of the Steve Martin look-alike contest in our extended family, and the funniest writer in my circle.
