Review - about four pages in length
Timothy
Egan's
Short
Nights of the Shadow Catcher:
The
Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Certainly
I do not consider myself to be an academic. And it was only in my
retirement that I discovered the joy of reading. Most of my reading
has been confined to history and biography – my belated attempt to
come to a greater understanding of the world I live in and the role
significant individuals have played in making it so. In doing this I
made many new "friends". How fascinating to discover the
contributions of people I had never heard of before. – particularly
the photographer of Native Americans,Edward Curtis. (I like to blame
my paucity of intellectual education that when I grew up in Texas we
neither had kindergarten nor 12th grade.
Having
grown up in Texas with many trips through the Indian country of the
Southwest, I should have known of the work of Edward Curtis. I feel
fortunate therefore that I chanced upon Egan's portrayal of Edward S.
Curtis'' lifelong devotion to documenting the lifestyle of over 80
Native American tribes and respect for Curtis. With no academic
training beyond the sixth grade, he toiled for some 54 years to
produce the definitive 20 volume set of books entitled "The
North American Indian". Working on this masterpiece from
1898 to 1929 he worked with luminaries including financier JP Morgan
and President Theodore Roosevelt while enduring not only hardships
but extreme poverty and jail in commitment to his cause.
Knowing
that many (primarily in my own family) do not have the luxury of time
to read the book, I want to share a bit of Egan's book from when
Curtis began the project in 1898 until his death in 1952. I hope my
writing conveys the fascination of his work and the exciting
experiences he had.
1898
It
was in '98 that Curtis joined the “climber of an impossible peak,”
"Bird Grinnell. That Grinnell? Yes George Bird Grinnell founder
of the Audubon Society, and considered the world's foremost expert on
Plain Indians. He traced his ancestry to the Mayflower. He knew
George Armstrong Custer. He had grown up with people like Cornelius
Vanderbilt. He counted among his best friends an ambitious young
politician, Theodore Roosevelt, just gearing up that summer to run
for governor of New York. Ten years earlier Grinnell and Roosevelt
had founded the Boone and Crockett Club devoted to preserving
wildlife in order to have the opportunity to shoot it later. Oh. and
it was "Dr. George Bird Grinnell, a PhD from Yale, though Curtis
could call him Bird. Please."
1900
"Near
the end of the Blackfeet summer, Curtis told Grinnell his mind was
set. He would embark on a massive undertaking, even bigger than
Bird's and suggested: a plan to photograph all intact Indian
communities left in North America, to capture the essence of their
lives before that essence disappeared 'the record to be of value to
future generations must be ethno- logically accurate......What's
more, after recording the song of the Sun Dance, Curtis further
expanding the scope and ambition: he would try to be a keeper of
secrets – not just as a a photographer but a stenographer of the
Great Mystery. And did the Edward Curtis, with his six grade
education, really expect to perform the multiple roles of
ethnographer, anthropologist and historian? He did. What Curtis
lacked in credentials, he made up for in confidence.– the
personality trait that led him to Mount Rainier's summit. Bird loved
the Big Idea.
The
New York Herald stated "The most gigantic undertaking since the
making of the King James edition of the Bible. The real Savage Indian
is fast disappearing are becoming metamorphosed into a mirror
ordinary uninteresting imitation of the white man is probably safe to
say Mr. Curtis knows more about the really in than any other white
man
1907-1908
SAYS
CUTLER THROUGH MEN'S LIVES AWAY:
The
headline was the least of it the story reported that Curtis had proof
that Custer "had unnecessarily sacrificed the lives of the
soldiers to further his personal end, and that he could've won the
battle with little loss of life I know it is unpopular to criticize
military, Curtis said but the Indians who were with him felt that
tilted his judgment was flawed. When the wise old Indian warriors
that were in this fight are ask what they think of Custer's course in
the battle they point to their heads and say,' he must have been
wrong up here'.
1908
- 1909
He
was presenting "The Story of a Vanishing Race" a picture
opera. This touring spectacle was a uniquely Curtis hybrid. The
visuals were slides from the photographer's work over a 15 year span.
He had painstakingly hand colored the slides, so that rock walls at
sunset in Canyon de Chelly had an apricot glow, and the faces shot at
the magic hour in New Mexico gave off a rugged blush. Using a
stereoptican projector or magic lantern as it was called Curtis
supplemented these stills with film and music .All of these images
buttressed the story narrated by Curtis himself, about an epic
tragedy: the slow fate of the people who had lived fascinating lives
long before the grandparents of those in the Carnegie box seats
sales from old Europe to seize their homeland. What made the entire
experience more memorable was the music inspired by the recordings of
Indian songs and chants to that Curtis had brought home on his wax
cylinders. The whole of it was a visual feast of the aboriginal as
the critics called it, created by a most American artist at the
height of his fame.
1922
– 1927
The
California of the 1920s was perhaps the most fertile place on earth
to grow a life in a state the size of Italy with climate often
compared to a soft caress, live barely 3 billion people. In the
California of the 1920s it was easier to find fake Indians in
Hollywood than real ones in the land of their ancestors. When the
Spanish sent missionaries in the 1700s, Indians numbered about
300,000 in the state. They lived in extended clans, grouped into more
than 100 distinct tribes none very big. They were sustained by
acorns and game in the Napa Valley, salmon and berries around the
Golden Gate, deer and roots in the Central Valley. They were as
varied as the terrain. By 1848, when the American flag replaced those
in Spain Russia Mexico and the Bear Flag Republic, the Indian
population was about 100,000. Over the next 10 years the high of
swift mortality wiped out 70,000 natives. What remained of the first
residents in California scattered to isolated pockets of the state.
The elimination – an indirect biological war – had been so
systematic and complete that in 1911, newspapers around the world
trumpeted a major discovery: an Indian named Ishi was found near the
slopes of Mount Lassen. The last surviving member of the Yahi tribe
was short, tangled – haired and middle-age, spoke a language no one
could understand. His name meant “man”in the Yana dialect, and he
was heralded as the last "primitive" Indian in the state.
From
Montana they cross the Canadian border into Alberta seeking the last
tribes in Canada. The tribes were spread over an enormous expanse of
tableland at the foot of the Rockies. Reaching them, getting their
stories and taking their pictures was akin to going into an area the
size of Germany and looking for a handful of old ethnic – Polish
families.
"The
five civilized Tribes of Oklahoma are so much civilized, so white,
they will be impossible while the wealthy Osage are not only becoming
civilized but wealth gives them a haughtiness difficult to overcome."
The Wichita were another kind of problem. It was a problem, this
business of civilized Tribes and tribes grown rich from oil
discoveries on tribal lands. The Wichita were another kind of
problem. Mormon and Baptist missionaries had been all over them, and
as a result, many tribal customs were now banned as pagan rituals.
Their practice could mean a sentence to hell. "Couldn't even
take a picture one of their grass houses.
No
tribe in the country and fallen so far as the Comanche. Once as
masters of an enormous swath of flatland, they forced Texans to
retreat behind settlement lines and Mexicans to run at the sight of
them. Indians from other tribes would slit their own throats before
allowing themselves to be take prisoners by a Comanche.
The
book on the Alaska natives, looked to be an easier production. There
remained one chance for redemption: to finish on a high note in the
far north. Alaska had held a special place in Curtis's heart ever
since he sea journey there with the Harriman expedition of 1899. He
was 31 that, still on the boyish side of manhood. The gimpy-legged
graybeard of 1927 who made plans for the final field trip of the
North American Indian was
broken, divorced, he year shy of his 60th birthday. He had a lifelong
nicotine addiction as well as assorted grumpy complaints about his
bad fortune at this stage of life. The joy for Curtis was the first
assistant, his daughter Beth who would finance the trip with money
from the studio and from her husband Manford Magnuson. For much of
her life she had dreamed of spending time in the wild with her
father. Daughter Florence had gotten to experience him in action in
California.
1927
Curtis had last plied these
northern waters 28 years earlier. That ship was stocked with liquor,
cigars and a canteen of costly preserved foods . Rail barron Edwsard
H. Harriman had spared no expense for the passengers. By contrast the
Victoria carried working stiffs – fisherman, bound for seasonal job
with the salmon fleet, Argonauts still chasing a strike in goldfields
that had played out years earlier. Nome was a dump. What it been in
1910 the largest city in Alaska territory with a population of nearly
15,000, was now a few hundred slope-shouldered souls in a
hand-me-down town.
Frustrated that he could find
it no one to take him to native villages, Curtis purchased a boat of
his own, the Jewel Guard, 40 feet long, 12 at the be with sails and
an an engine for windless days. It came with the skipper, a Swede
called Harry the Fish. On June 28 they sailed for Nunivak Island a
distance of about 300 miles – the four of them. On the island more
than any other time other in the field, his pictures showed smiles!
Native children, native women native elders exuding a deep beauty.
Their nose rings and chin piercings were dazzling little orbs of
jewelry sparkling in the sunlight. Think of it, he wrote, at last,
and for the first time in all my 30 years of work with the natives, I
have found a place where no missionary's work."
.But a day later they found the
scene of squalor and grim faced toil among 300 and so Yuk'ip Eskimos.
What struck the Curtis party was the filth of the people. They
smelled as bad as they looked, reeking of rotten seal meat, smoked
fish and sea detritus. I have not seen all the world's dirty natives
but I can't say that no human can carry more sales than those here.
Living as they do in mud and damp, it is estimated that 75% have
tuberculosis.
Arriving in Seattle he was
approached by two uniform Sheriff's deputies and several operatives
of the Burns Detective Agency. "We have a warrant for your
arrest." He was thrown in a cell with other unfortunate. His
divorced wife Claire Curtis had gotten wind of her ex-husband's
pending arrival and stated she was owed $4400 in unpaid alimony since
1920.
1927 – 1932
The judge summarized the Curtis
defense. "Do I understand that you will receive no money for
this lengthy project?" Curtis nodded, his eyes misted. "I
work for nothing". Flabbergasted, the judge said. "Then why
are you doing it?" "Your Honor, it was my job… The only
thing I could do that was worth doing. I was duty-bound to finish.
He had two volumes to go. The
book on the Indians of Oklahoma would be most difficult to write. In
my lifetime, I've seen no group of Indians not influenced by
Christianity.
Curtis felt he had done a fair
job of making something from nothing. He printed alphabets,
pronunciation guides, many full pages of sheet music of native songs
and he tried, once again to correct misconceptions, about spiritual
life with several pages devoted to a forceful defense of the Peyote
society. The missionaries who describe the Peyote ceremony as "devil
worship" and "drug–eating debauchery" had completely
missed the point. In fact many Christian converts took Peyote in a
ritual that lasted from dust till dawn, a mind altering way to
connect to the creator. As Quanah Parker, the last chief of the wild
Comanche had said in defense of the hallucinatory experience of
Indian worship: “The white man goes into his church and talks
about Jesus but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to
Jesus."
1932 – 1952
In October 1932, Clara Curtis
climbed into a rowboat near her sister's home in Puget Sound. In the
chop of the sudden breeze fell overboard into the 42° waters and
drown.
In 1936 Curtis stated, "Yes
I am certainly broke. Other than that, I am not down and out."
He had two daughters and a son nearby in Southern California and a
fourth child in Oregon. He kicked around many a gold seal, scraping
high mountain ground in the Sierra Nevada until dark. In the trough
of the depression, Curtis was living and to mouse but good luck
struck when Cecil D DeMille began filming a variety of Westerners in
1936 he asked if Curtis could help with photographic stills,
camerawork and logistics.
E. S. CURTIS, INDIAN-LIFE
HISTORIAN, DIES
on October 19, 1932, Curtis died
of a heart attack. He was 84. It was a national curse, it seemed once
again, to take as a life task the challenge of trying to capture in
illustrated form a significant part of the American story. The Indian
painter George Catlin had died broke and forgotten. Matthew Brady,
the Civil War photographer who gave up his prosperous portrait
business to become a pioneer of photojournalism, spent his last days
in a dingy rooming house, alone and penniless. Curtis took his final
breath in a home not much larger than the tent he used to set up on
the floor of Canyon de Chelly.
