Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Photo

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. First Picture

  2. Encounter on a Volcano

  3. The Big Idea

  4. Indian Napoleon

  5. With the President

  6. In the Den of the Titan

  7. Anglos in Indian Country

  8. The Artist and His Audience

  9. The Custer Conundrum

  10. The Most Remarkable Man

  11. On the River of the West

  12. New Art Forms

  13. Moving Pictures

  14. Lost Days

  15. Second Wind

  16. The Longest Days

  17. Fight to the Finish

  18. Twilight

  Epilogue: Revival

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Photo Credit

  Index

  About the Author

  Books by Timothy Egan

  Copyright © 2012 by Timothy Egan

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Egan, Timothy.

  Short nights of the Shadow Catcher : the epic life and immortal photographs of Edward Curtis / Timothy Egan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-618-96902-9 (hardback)

  1. Curtis, Edward S., 1868–1952. 2. Photographers—United States— Biography. 3. Indians of North America—Pictorial works. I. Title.

  TR140.C82E43 2012

  770.92—dc23 2012022390

  eISBN 978-0-547-84060-4

  v1.1012

  Frontispiece: Edward S. Curtis, self-portrait, 1899

  In memory of Joan Patricia Lynch Egan, mother of seven, who filled us with the Irish love of the underdog and of the written word. She was sustained by books until the very end.

  We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless or else Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.

  —GERONIMO APACHE

  What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is in the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.

  —CROWFOOT BLACKFEET

  1. First Picture

  1896

  THE LAST INDIAN OF Seattle lived in a shack down among the greased piers and coal bunkers of the new city, on what was then called West Street, her hovel in the grip of Puget Sound, off plumb in a rise above the tidal flats. The cabin was two rooms, cloaked in a chipped jacket of clapboards, damp inside. Shantytown was the unofficial name for this part of the city, and if you wanted to dump a bucket of cooking oil or a rusted stove or a body, this was the place to do it. It smelled of viscera, sewage and raw industry, and only when a strong breeze huffed in from the Pacific did people onshore get a brief, briny reprieve from the residual odors of their labor.

  The city was named for the old woman’s father, though the founders had trouble pronouncing See-ahlsh, a kind of guttural grunt to the ears of the midwesterners freshly settled at the far edge of the continent. Nor could they fathom how to properly say Kick-is-om-lo, his daughter. So the seaport became Seattle, much more melodic, and the eccentric Indian woman was renamed Princess Angeline, the oldest and last surviving child of the chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish. Seattle died in 1866; had the residents of the village on Elliott Bay followed the custom of his people, they would have been forbidden to speak his name for at least a year after his death. As it was, his spirit was insulted hourly, at the least, on every day of that first year. “Princess” was used in condescension, mostly. How could this dirty, toothless wretch living amid the garbage be royalty? How could this tiny beggar in calico, bent by time, this clam digger who sold bivalves door to door, this laundress who scrubbed clothes on the rocks, be a princess?

  “The old crone” was a common term for Angeline.

  “Ragged remnant of royalty” was a more fanciful description. She was famous for her ugliness. Nearly blind, her eyes a quarter-rise slit without noticeable lashes. Said to have a single tooth, which she used to clamp a pipe. A face often compared to a washrag. The living mummy of Princess Angeline was a tourist draw, lured out for the amusement of visiting dignitaries. When she met Benjamin Harrison, the shaggy-bearded twenty-third president of the United States, during his 1891 trip to Puget Sound, the native extended a withered hand and shouted “Kla-how-ya,” a traditional greeting. Though she clearly knew many English phrases, she refused to speak the language of the new residents.

  “Nika halo cumtuv,” her contemporaries quoted her as saying. “I cannot understand.”

  Angeline was nearly alone in using words that had clung like angel hair to the forested hills above the bay for centuries. Lushootseed, the Coast Salish dialect, was her native tongue, once spoken by about eight thousand people who lived all around the inland sea, their hamlets holding to the higher ground near streams that delivered the tyee, also called the Chinook or king salmon, to the doorsteps of their big-boned timber lodges. “Angeline came to our house shortly before her death,” a granddaughter of one of the city’s founders remembered. “She sat on a stool and spoke in native tongue. We forgot her ugliness and her grumpiness and realized as never before the tragedy of her life and that of all Indians.”

  They could appreciate the tragedy, of course, in an abstract, vaguely sympathetic way, because they had no doubt that Indians would soon disappear from what would become the largest city on the continent named for a Native American. Well before the twentieth century dawned, there was a rush to the past tense in a country with plenty of real, live indigenous people in its midst. Angeline, by the terms of the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855, was not even allowed to reside in town; the pact said the Duwamish and Suquamish had to leave, get out of sight, move across the bay to a sliver of rocky ground set aside for the aborigines. The bands who had lived by the rivers that drained the Cascade Mountains gave up two million acres for a small cash settlement, one blanket and four and a half yards of cloth per person. Eleven years later, Seattle passed a law making it a crime for anyone to harbor an Indian within the city limits.

  Angeline ignored the treaty and the ordinance. She refused to move; she had no desire to live among the family clans and their feuds on the speck of reservation land that looked back at the rising sun. The Boston Men, as older Indians called the wave of Anglos from that distant port, allowed tiny Angeline to stay put—a free-to-roam sovereign outcast in the land of her ancestors. She was harmless, after all: a quaint, colorful connection to a vanquished past. Poor broken Angeline. Is she still here, in that dreadful shack? God, what a piteous sight. She was even celebrated in verse by the early mythologists of Seattle:

  Her wardrobe was a varied one

  Donated by most everyone.

  But Angeline deemed it not worthwhile

  To put on others’ cast-off style!

  And much preferred a plain bandanna

  To ’kerchief silk from far Havana.

  The children of the new city, the American boys in short pants, had no verse or kind words for her. Angeline was prey. Great fun. They taunted the gnarled Indian, threw rocks at her. These urchins would lurk around the waterfront after school, looking to catch Angeline by surprise, then they would fire their stones at her and watch her squawk
in befuddlement.

  “You old hag!” the boys shouted.

  But she gave as good as she got. Under those layers of filthy skirts, Angeline carried rocks for self-defense. She didn’t leave the shack without ammunition. She didn’t hide or retreat, but instead would sink an arthritic hand into one of her many pockets, find a stone and let it rip back at the boys. Take that, you bastards! Once, she hit Rollie Denny, he of the founding family whose name was all over the plats of the fast-expanding city. Hit him square with a rock for all to see, at the corner of Front Street and Madison. This also became part of the verse, the poetic myth: the crippled, sickly, elfin descendant of Chief Seattle nailed the snot-nosed kid, heir to much of the land taken from the native people.

  For once he hit her with a stone

  And she hit him back and made him moan!

  No one was certain of Angeline’s age. Some accounts said she was near one hundred, though that surely was an exaggeration. Most placed her at about eighty. The year 1896 was particularly hard on the princess. For days at a time she kept to her cabin, which she shared off and on with a roustabout grandchild. The boy was born to Angeline’s daughter, who had been living with a white drunk, Joe Foster, who beat her on a regular basis. After putting up with the abuse for years, the woman strung a rope from the rafters of her home and hanged herself. From then on, Joe Foster Jr. was in Angeline’s care. When the Indian was sick, people left baskets of food on her doorstep, though feral dogs would sometimes get to the food before the princess could. Whenever a church lady stopped by, Angeline would wave her off. A glimpse inside her cabin found dirty dishes stacked high, a cold bunk, cobwebs in the corners, Joe Foster Jr. nowhere in sight.

  She had a deep cough, from tobacco smoke and the ambient chill. They cared about Angeline, these fine women of new Seattle, because for all her surface squalor she was believed to be saintly. “She is the only Indian woman I know whose morals are above reproach,” said one of the church ladies. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but a contrast to the characterization of another member of a Seattle pioneer family. “The Indians at best are but a poor, degraded race,” wrote Catherine Blaine, wife of the Reverend Blaine, in a letter home to the Midwest, “far inferior to even the lowliest among you.” The reverend had a harsher view. “The coarse, filthy, debased natives,” he called the inhabitants of this beautiful region. “Pitiable objects of neglect and degradation,” he wrote. “They lie, gamble, steal, get drunk and all other bad things almost as a matter of duty.”

  The good ladies insisted that Angeline seek medical attention. She must not spend another day in the sloping shack by the shore or she would soon die. Against her will, the Indian was taken to the hospital up the hill. There she sat, sphinxlike, not saying a word. A doctor got her to put down her cane, take the pipe out of her mouth, remove the scarf and bandanna, and strip away a few layers of skirt. She had been diagnosed with pneumonia once before, and this current bronchial congestion and deep wheezing indicated another round of a feared and possibly fatal sickness. She needed care, the doctors told the church ladies, a warm, clean bed, some ointments and hot soup at the least. But Angeline was done with this place. When the doctor left the room, she quickly put the layers back on, wrapped her scarf around her head, reached for her pipe and cane, and fled, rocks clanking in her pockets. Out the door she went, mumbling, mumbling. What was that she said? Something about the hospital being a skookum house—a white man’s jail. Away she went to the shore, to her shack, to the reliable music of water slapping sea rocks. Enough of the church ladies and their nickels and baked goods and castoffs, enough of the doctors and their probing instruments.

  And that is where twenty-eight-year-old Edward Sherriff Curtis found Princess Angeline. He knew of her, of course. Everyone did. Despite her ugliness—or, more likely, because of it—she was the most famous person in Seattle, her image on china plates and other knickknacks sold to visitors who flooded into Puget Sound as the weather warmed. A sketch of her face once adorned the pages of the New York Sun, which hailed her as “the pet of the city.” If she was not the actual last Indian of Seattle, people in town certainly treated her that way: her very existence served as a living expression of how one way of life was far inferior to the other, and that it was the natural order of things for these native people to pass on. Just look at her.

  “Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine!”

  So said Chief Seattle himself in his famous treaty speech. Well, maybe not. His translator, Dr. Henry A. Smith, was an eloquent fabulist, and only relayed these words many years after the Duwamish tribal head had passed away, in 1866. But for the inheritors of a moisture-kissed land so stunning it was hailed by the British explorer George Vancouver in 1792 as “exhibiting everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view,” they expressed the prevailing sentiment. And so these haunted words went into the chief’s mouth, the speech refined along the way as it was chiseled into American history and twined to the city’s creation myth.

  “Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.”

  And:

  “A few more moons, a few more winters and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes protected by the Great Spirit will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours.”

  And:

  “These shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.”

  When Curtis saw Angeline moving along the shore, the visible nearly dead, using that cane of hers more like a blind woman trying to find her way than an old lady struggling for balance, she looked at once like the perfect subject. There against the deep waters of Puget Sound, there with the snow-mantled Olympic Mountains framed behind her, there with the growl of earth-digging machines and the snorts of steamships and loading crews and the clatter of streetcars and trolleys—with all of that, Curtis saw a moment from a time before any white man had looked upon these shores. He saw a person and nature, one and the same in his mind, as they belonged. A frozen image of a lost time: he must take that picture before she passed.

  Curtis had come bounding down the steep hill from the big house into which he had just moved his ever-expanding family, at 413 Eighth Avenue. And what a vision of style, manliness and ambition he presented. He was positively glowing as he moved, already a master of the fastest-growing city in the American West. With his six-foot-two-inch frame, he towered over Angeline. His Vandyke beard, his polished boots, his hat tipped rakishly to one side, barely above the heavy-lidded eyes, made him look like a bit of a dandy. There was style to his swagger. He had the kind of charisma that came from a combination of looks, confidence and good luck. “He has a dreamy, sort of drawly voice,” one male admirer wrote. “His blue eyes are sleepy ones with a half-subdued air of humor lurking in their depths.”

  But what the merchants who waved to him and bid him “Good morning, Mr. Curtis” and the strangers who smiled warmly at the sleepy-eyed man in full did not know was how much of his persona was forced, a creation young Curtis had forged in a remarkably short period of time.

  Yes, he owned the fancy studio downtown, six blocks from home, with a portrait-filled parlor that alone was worth a visit. Yes, he was married to a gorgeous woman, dark-haired and intelligent, with one child and a second on the way, and they shared that house up the hill with his mother and other family members. And yes, the discerning Argus, well read in the region by the well fed, had pronounced Curtis and his partner the leading photographers of Puget Sound a mere five years after Curtis mortgaged the family homestead to buy into a picture shop. “One of the greatest examples of business energy and perseverance to be found in Seattle today,” the paper said. If you had any money and beauty, or desired both, it was de rigueur to pose for the master who worked behind the standing lens at Curtis and Guptill, Photographers and Photoengravers. The things they could do: the shadows, the pain
terly effects, the daring nudes (not advertised)! It was portrait photography—art—a bit risky for its intimacy and far ahead of the routine pictures that every family of means displayed in its drawing room. The finished picture could be printed on a gold or silver plaque, a method that was “original to Curtis and Guptill,” the Argus noted, “brilliant and beautiful beyond description.”

  Curtis had developed a reputation for finding the true character of his subjects. He did the civic leaders—Judge Thomas Burke, the progressive hero who had stood up to a mob trying to force the Japanese out of Seattle by rifle and pitchfork. And the Gilded Age rich—Samuel Hill, public gadfly and railroad man, who dreamed of building a European castle on a bluff above the Columbia River. But he also captured the face of the trolley car driver who had saved a month’s pay to sit before Curtis in his spiffy uniform, of the sailor who planned his shore leave around a session in front of the camera. He brought out the radiance of the young strivers, women of seventeen convinced that a Curtis portrait was a passport to a better life. Visiting celebrities were guided to the studio, there to be charmed by the tall, dashing young man with the silk ribbon around his hat, smoking cigarettes between takes, constantly in motion, in and out of the dark veil that cloaked his camera. In the manner of the instant cities that looked out to the Pacific, Curtis had risen so quickly, had come from so little to be so much. If only they knew. But this was the Far West, where a man’s past, once it was discarded, buried or lost in a distant land, stayed that way.

  What Angeline did to stay alive, the grubbing and foraging and digging and cutting, was what Ed Curtis had done in his early years. Curtis had been the clam digger, up to his knees in Puget Sound muck. Curtis had been the berry picker, his arms sliced with surface cuts from rummaging through thorny thickets above the shore. Curtis had scraped away at whatever he could find in the tidal flats, whatever could be felled or milled or monetized to keep a family fed. He’d lived a subsistence life, his hands a pair of blistered claws, his joints raw from the rock-moving and log-rolling, just like the crone in the red scarf. His father was called, in the term of the day, dirt poor. A Civil War private and army chaplain, Johnson A. Curtis was sickly and in foul temper for much of the great conflict; after being discharged, he never found his way or recovered his health. One thing he brought home from the dreary War Between the States was a camera lens. Not a camera, just the lens. It sat for a dozen years, untouched. Johnson Curtis married Ellen Sherriff, stern-faced and bushy-browed, started a family—Edward was the second child of four, born near Whitewater, Wisconsin, on February 16, 1868—and bounced around the rural hamlets of Le Sueur County, Minnesota, trying to turn the ground for food or a soul for Jesus. He was miserable, a complete failure. Ed Curtis supplemented the meager offerings at the family table with snapping turtles and muskrats he caught in the creek; one made a soup, the other could be smoked and eaten as a snack. It was never enough.