Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (37 page)

T
HE CALIFORNIA OF THE
1920s was perhaps the most fertile place on earth to grow a life. In a state the
size of Italy, with a climate often compared to a soft caress, lived barely three
million people—and most of them in two urban clusters, around the splendid San Francisco
Bay and in the semidesert strip of Mediterranean idyll in the south. The natural nursery
of heavy winter rains and river-delivered black soil meant an abundance of earthly
riches: cloud-busting redwoods in the north, billowy copses of wild oak in the foothills
east of the bay, prickly pear cacti and spike-flowered yuccas in the south. It was
all elbow room and opportunity in the sunshine, unless your family had lived there
for centuries and centuries. For 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 a hundred 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. In manner and outlook,
they were as varied as the terrain. By 1848, when the American flag replaced those
of Spain, Russia, Mexico and the Bear Flag Republic, the Indian population was about
100,000. Over the next ten years, a tide of swift mortality wiped out 70,000 natives.
What remained of the first residents of 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, he was brought to the University of California at Berkeley for study and probing,
a living exhibit. Ishi was short, tangle-haired and middle-aged, and 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.

For Edward Curtis, looking to revive a life work that had been largely dormant for
much of the previous eight years, California was a challenge. Even the most knowledgeable
anthropologist, aided by a network of native insiders, would be hard-pressed to find
remnants of the old life. How to present a culture when only a few scraps existed?
Myers had been working California since the team finished with the Kwakiutl in 1914,
collecting field notes, conducting interviews, checking facts with scholars.
Start in the north,
he advised Curtis: go to the mountains, the tangle of vines and old-growth trees.
The Indians of California were as hidden as the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon.

Curtis packed a tent, a cot, a bedroll, clothes, a Coleman stove, pots and pans, several
cameras, a recording device, reference books and food into a Chevrolet coupe and headed
upstate from Los Angeles. He drove through the Central Valley, following the San Joaquin
River and then the big artery of the Sacramento before veering northwest toward the
volcano of Mount Shasta and the folds of mountain ranges in the Trinity and Klamath
wilderness areas. Getting out of the city and back under an open sky did wonders for
his mildewed spirit. And there was an added lift: in the tiny town of Williams, just
outside Mendocino National Forest, an easygoing, conversational twenty-three-year-old
woman stepped off a train from Seattle and fell into the arms of her father. Florence
Curtis wanted to connect with her dad as an assistant in the field. Her hair was cut
short for the summer, a bob. At fifty-four, Curtis had grayed considerably since “Flo”
last saw him, and had lost most of his hair on top, which he covered with an ever-present
cap. The Vandyke beard, his trademark since the 1890s, remained. He walked with a
noticeable limp, and told Florence it was from an encounter with a whale while filming
the Kwakiutl—the leviathan’s tail had whacked Curtis, severely limiting his mobility.
This tale of the tail was just that; the whale, of course, had been purchased dead
and towed to the film site. But why attribute a slowing of the great man to the boring
grind of age when an adventure in Indian country would add to his legend? If Curtis
had begun to embellish his life, Florence did not hold it against him. She found her
father a delight—“brawny and brave,” she said later, but also “a gentle, sensitive
man.”

Clara was out of Edward’s life, except for missives from her lawyers complaining
about tardy alimony payments. He was kept afloat emotionally by the two daughters
who worshiped him and a son who wanted to move back west. Beth was twenty-seven and
married now to a portrait photographer named Manford Magnuson—a likable addition to
the Curtis family. She ran the studio in Los Angeles and spoke for her father on many
an occasion, in letter form or on the phone.

The studio and Hollywood work had finally generated some needed money to get Curtis
out with the Indians. He’d been putting a few dollars aside in those gray years as
well, from royalties of a little children’s book he’d published in 1915 and continued
to sell,
Indian Days of the Long Ago.
All of this gave him just enough to buy a long furlough away from Hollywood. In Seattle,
he was a man from another era, and a subject of dark rumors inside the Rainier Club,
where some of his best pictures—magnificently finished and framed—now covered many
walls. In Los Angeles he was a minor appendage to a star-making factory. But the closer
he got to Indian country, the more Curtis felt like his old self—an aging zephyr,
on the move again in search of American originals. With a measure of dignity restored,
Curtis felt strong enough to renew a correspondence with an old friend.

“I am certain you will be glad to know that I am in the field working with Indians,”
he wrote Meany in the summer of 1922, the first letter in seven months. “I am out
on a three or four month trip with the Indians of northern California . . . Florence
is with me. Other than that, I am alone.”

Curtis had emerged from his bleak hibernation earlier that year with a characteristic
burst, rousing himself for a sizable achievement in producing Volume XII. This publication
was devoted entirely to the Hopi, the second time he had given over all of one work
to a single tribe. Jack Morgan paid for the printing, after being nagged by testy
subscribers who had not seen anything new from the Shadow Catcher since 1916. The
Hopi volume was brilliant, Curtis at the top of his form, the book stuffed with some
of his best images collected over a twenty-year period. He had spent seven seasons
with the tribe, more than any other, though his last trip, in 1919, was a disappointment.
The grim wheels of modernity, which had rolled over the mesas of central Arizona ten
years earlier, had left their tracks everywhere. As a result, book twelve was a history
more than a contemporary snapshot. But what a story in graphic form. His pictures
had that intimacy again, devoid of subject-and-photographer awkwardness. In shots
of unwed girls of the Hopi Nation, with their hair tied in those squash blossom whorls
that marked their virginity and looked like giant mouse ears, you can almost hear
the giggling. In a picture titled
Afternoon Chat,
some of the women cover their mouths in amusement. A crowded still life,
On the Housetop,
is a village scene that explains many facets of Hopi living—the kiva entrance, the
ladder to the upper rooms, a baking area where piki bread is prepared, an outdoor
oven. And perched around the village like birds on a tree limb are women with black-and-white
shawls, their hair wound as tight as a lollipop. Whether in close-ups, like the picture
of a child awaiting the return of the snake dancers, or in one showing a Hopi man
with straight bangs and early frown lines, or in the long shots that feature architecture
and building styles, Curtis offered the most detailed representation of a single tribe
ever committed to film.

In the text, cowritten by Myers, it’s clear how much of a hold the tribe had on Curtis.
“There is a subtle charm about the Hopi and their high-perched homes that has made
the work particularly delightful . . . Numerically weak, poor in worldly goods, physically
small, they possess true moral courage.” The setting was sublime. “The incredible
blueness of the sky and brilliance of the stars take hold of the heart and call one
back again and again.” He detailed an ancient life on eight pueblos carved into the
tops of mesas. He told how they had been able to fight off Christianity for nearly
four hundred years; only in recent times had a faction of the tribe succumbed to missionaries.
He lamented that “a futile decree that Hopi must wear their hair short” and the “blundering
interference in harmless religious and personal customs” had resulted in “a gradual
abandonment of the old order.” In expressing such a sentiment, Curtis was speaking
for himself as much as the Hopi. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded of this enchanted
bit of high-desert ground, “There is a rather disheartening air of newness.”

In California, the Curtis pair pressed the wobbly wheeled Chevy over the high passes
around Mount Shasta and ducked into dark forests on the west slope, aiming for hamlets
of aboriginal life along the rivers that fell away toward the coast. Most of the area
was roadless, a remnant of continental America that had been largely untouched by
the tide of humanity then filling other empty spaces on the map. While San Francisco
County had a population of 500,000, a few hundred miles north, Trinity County numbered
only 2,500 people in its two-million-acre expanse, and not a single incorporated city.
Curtis named his car Nanny, for its goatlike prowess at clinging to precipitous vertical
sides and leading them onward, upward, downward.

Florence was astonished at her father’s pace and his skill in the outdoors. He seemed
to know every bird and fish, the name of every flower and fir and deciduous tree along
the way. He sensed a coming storm by cloud formations and wind, and remained strangely
calm when it looked as if they were lost. In the evening, he put up camp quickly,
though it did not look like a hastily thrown-together resting spot. He insisted that
the tent always be placed in the finest setting, for the view. In the morning, when
Florence awoke, he had coffee brewing and cheese omelets on the Coleman stove. He
tried to procure fresh fish at the close of a day. For those dinners, Curtis expertly
filleted the salmon and grilled it, skin side against the fire, as the Indians did,
and as Curtis had done on the Columbia. He liked his vegetables barely cooked, to
keep the flavor intact, and he always brought enough ingredients to toss a salad with
Roquefort dressing, the recipe that had dazzled the Roosevelt family. Dessert was
poached pears or other fresh fruit, slightly caramelized. All of this was camping
fare, done without a kitchen. For sleeping, he weaved spruce boughs into a cushiony
bed, “a work of art, and so comfortable,” as Florence remembered.

Watching him assemble the set pieces of his life work, Florence was in awe of the
one-man
North American Indian
project. She had seen him at work in Canyon de Chelly among the Navajo, dashing between
thunderstorms, experimenting with exposures by closing and opening the flap of a tent
that served as a portable studio, cutting deals in native shorthand. At the time,
she was a girl of seven and could not appreciate his skills in the rugged world he
inhabited outside Seattle. As an adult, Florence was amazed at how they would arrive
in a strange village and, by day’s close, have people posing for him. One rainy afternoon
looked like it would end with nothing to show. But Curtis found a teenage girl living
along the Smith River. He offered her a silver dollar if she would dress up in a cloak
of her family’s making and pose on a bluff against a metallic sky. The Tolowa woman
was photographed in a bejeweled deerskin kilt, her face in profile. Curtis used a
6½-by-8½-inch camera for this work, the lens expanding out like an accordion, and
durable for the bouncing ride of Nanny.

Another time, they camped not far from Ukiah, where Indians labored in the bean fields.
The day had been hot, near 100 degrees in Flo’s telling. Curtis and daughter were
just settling down with the dip of the sun when an Indian girl ran into camp, breathless.
She explained that her grandmother had been picking beans in the heat and now seemed
dizzy, sick. Curtis must come at once. He fired up the coupe and followed the girl’s
directions to the Indian settlement. Inside a small lean-to he found a woman who appeared
very ill. Florence urged her father to get a doctor.

“That’s for them to decide.”

Curtis did in fact summon a doctor, but not one with a degree. A medicine man who
had been hired by Curtis as a translator arrived with herbal remedies and went to
work on the old woman. Curtis and Flo returned to their own camp. The next day, the
girl came back with news: her grandmother was much better. “Our medicine man knew
what to do.” What surprised Florence was that her father had enough faith in the Indians
to heal themselves without outside help.

They crossed the coastal mountains, driving east to west, then west to east, in a
dizzying zigzag, six times that summer. Nanny held up, but for one hiccup. On a mountain
road carved into the red soil of the Klamath range, Curtis veered off to the side,
the way narrowing without warning. His car was forced to the edge, where there was
no more level ground to hold them. The coupe slipped, slouching toward a deep gorge.
Curtis bit on the cigarette in his mouth and gunned the engine; it was just enough
to move the car a few more feet, avoiding a free fall. But still, in the tug of gravity,
the car leaned, fell on its side and started to tumble. The chasm yawned several hundred
feet down. By some miracle the car came to rest on a hardy oak anchored to the mountainside.
The tree saved them from certain death, they both recalled, though Curtis credited
his driving skill.