Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (4 page)

From Angeline, Curtis learned about other Duwamish and Suquamish people who lived
at the edges of the city, upriver, hidden from view. They saw the Point Elliott Treaty
as a betrayal and had never signed on to it. Curtis waited along the riverbanks for
them to return from picking hops in the fields, their dugouts loaded down, baskets
on the shore. When they saw his camera the Indians would shy away, or force an expression.

“No, no. Please. Just as you were.”

From other Indians he learned about the reservation to the north, the Tulalip, where
he was told he could see native people living the old way. He went to that little
patch of the Indian realm, became acquainted with the tribal policeman and his wife,
and spent hours watching the unremarkable rituals of daily life. At home in Seattle,
the paying work was backing up: so many engagement pictures to be taken, ingénues
to immortalize, businessmen to satisfy. He would get to all of it, but what stirred
him most was the Big Outside—mountains, brooding forests, a saltwater inlet untouched
by machines, and these nearly spectral people who seemed to belong to the land.

Curtis paid the Indians on the Tulalip reservation, just as he had paid Angeline,
buying access. But again, he stressed to his subjects that all he wanted was to observe
them going about their day, gathering shellfish, weaving baskets from reeds. He wasn’t
there to tell them how to do anything. Just the opposite.

“I will work with you,” he said. “Not at you.”

These pictures had elements of a seventeenth-century Dutch master framing the common
class—Vermeer’s
The Milkmaid,
or even his
Girl with the Pearl Earring.
Curtis did not consider himself to be doing a historian’s work or that of a journalist
or ethnologist. Still, it was important to get it down, and get it right. “The people
in the main were sedentary, inhabiting well-made wooden houses,” he wrote of his new
acquaintances, trying to correct a false impression of Indian mobility in every part
of the West. And if people in Seattle thought native home-building was nothing more
than a variant of the primitive shack of Princess Angeline, Curtis knew better; he
had seen the glories. They didn’t live in leaky animal-skin tipis or under a roof
of bug-ridden brush. “The triumph of their architecture,” he wrote, included a communal
lodge that was “520 feet long, 60 feet wide, 15 feet high, supported by 74 split timbers”
and built by Angeline’s people just a half century earlier without modern tools. “Agriculture
was unknown” to the Coast Salish, he explained, not because Indians were too stupid
to till the ground, but because “the ease with which food could be had from the sea
left no incentive for development of agricultural life.” As a witness, young Curtis
sensed the value of a diminishing world; it occurred to him in a stark epiphany that
if he could capture these closing hours, he would have something of lasting value.

Princes Angeline died in her cabin on May 31, 1896.

ANGELINE IS NO MORE
AGED INDIAN PRINCESS
PASSES INTO SPIRIT LAND

So blared the page-one headline of the leading morning paper, the
Post-Intelligencer,
accompanied by a sketch drawn from the Curtis studio portrait. City dignitaries hailed
Chief Seattle’s daughter without reserve. “Princess Angeline was the best known and
most picturesque Indian character of the Pacific Coast, or possibly in the United
States,” said one prominent Seattleite. She was easily the most beloved of “the dusky
daughters of the soil,” said another. For her funeral, the church ladies solicited
money to build a casket in the form of a dugout canoe, which was prominently displayed
at a mass in Our Lady of Good Help Church. She was buried under a big slab of rough-hewn
granite at Lake View Cemetery. On the stone was chiseled: “Angeline, Daughter of Sealth,
May 31, 1896.” Her cane was passed on to a civic grandee. In death, she gave the mythic
poem of her life its last lines:

There she lies, the Indian Queen

Wrinkled, wise old Angeline.

At the far southern edge of the city, near Lake Washington, a street was named for
the princess. Her passing was news across the United States, detailed in a lengthy
wire-service article. “She is almost certainly the last of the Duwamish Tribe,” the
story concluded. And with that, the new inhabitants of this part of the Far West closed
the book on a people whose presence had gone back to at least the time of the Roman
Empire—most everyone, that is, but young Edward Curtis. For him, Angeline was the
start of the largest, most comprehensive and ambitious photographic odyssey in American
history. The second step would be upward, into the clouds.

T
EN THOUSAND VERTICAL
feet above the confines of his studio in Seattle, Curtis positioned himself now on
Mount Rainier at the magic hour of a midsummer day—a time when glaciers that had been
blue would blush for a few minutes. He set up his camera on a platform overlooking
two downward-thrusting fjords of ice, wrinkled with crevasses eighty feet deep or
more. He was shooting in black and white with his 14-by-17, but even glass plates
without the ability to hold color could mirror something that few eyes had seen, there
in the alpenglow of the volcano.

For two years, Curtis had stalked Rainier in all its moods, catching the savagery
of its storms, the exuberance of its wildflower burst, the listlessness of dead-zone
fog that wrapped the mountain in spooky silence. In order to get close enough to understand
Rainier, Curtis had to become a mountaineer. And in those two years of exploration,
the sickly cripple of seven years earlier had become an accomplished climber. Curtis
would find his way over ice and above the clouds, would crawl over crumbling lava
rock and slow-tread along shaky snow bridges, making his own path. Intimacy—as with
Princess Angeline—was what he sought with this subject.

The natives in canoes and the big mountain sixty miles southeast of Seattle struck
him as the most authentic parts of a region rapidly remaking itself. In the city,
forests and hills were leveled, rivers were pinched, and boulders that had been left
from the last glacial epoch were dynamited. Ports were dredged ever deeper and fields
gouged open for canals—all in a great hurry to form a new metropolis. In defiance
of the setting, the people of Seattle intended to bring the city’s bedrock hills down
to something closer to the streets of their hometowns of Cleveland and Chicago. Giant
hoses sluiced away the tops of Denny and Jackson hills, the mud running downslope
to fill in the tideland near Angeline’s old shack.

The younger Curtis, Asahel, was drawn to the urban creation, and spent his free time
shooting industrial pictures, buildings rising, scrub brush turned to broad avenues.
He was trying to establish a name outside the studio where he had worked for his brother
since 1895. The boys shared a belief that their entrée into the larger world would
be through a camera. While Asahel shot the mess of a city’s dawning, Ed Curtis was
pulled to the bigger palette that started at Seattle’s edge. And if getting close
to Rainier meant he had to warm himself in steam vents at the summit to keep from
freezing, or duck into a snow cave that might smother him in a seismic shrug, he was
game for it. The studio restrained him, even more so after he shed his partner in
1897 and went out on his own as “Edward S. Curtis, Photographer and Photoengraver.”
In the city, he was the maestro with a trademark fishhook signature and a calendar
full of appointments. In the high country, he was Curtis the climber, going places
no photographer had gone.

In the fading light now he looked down across the Nisqually Glacier and saw what appeared
to be a small party on this summer’s eve. The clouds swooshed in on an ocean-borne
current. Camp Muir was often a reliable bench above the evening fog. But with a strong
westerly wind, the clouds could be pushed upward, obscuring the white wilderness.
A few minutes was all it took for what had been an uninterrupted view in all directions
to disappear, visibility reduced to nothing. Curtis lost sight of the climbers below,
though their voices remained.

“Hellooooooooo,” came a cry through a purgatory of gray. Curtis bellowed back. He
sealed his camera and tucked it in his knapsack. Using his six-foot-long alpenstock,
with a metallic pick at one end, he stabilized himself as he took small, quick steps
downward toward the human sound.

“Over here!”

After some back and forth, silhouettes appeared in the soup, accompanied by much chattering
and staccato grumbling. They were a half-dozen men, adrift and confounded on one of
Rainier’s most treacherous glaciers, the Nisqually, an ice field nearly five miles
long.

“We’re lost.” The climbers were middle-aged and well outfitted, and looked to be fit
and robust for their age. They were shivering, mist collected on their mustaches,
clothes soaked. Curtis knew that dusk could be disorienting and deadly at this altitude.
Down below, the flower meadows were known as Wonderland, and a campsite was called
Paradise. Up high, names were as hard as the eternal snow: Cadaver Gap and Disappointment
Cleaver. Rainier was the most heavily glaciated peak in the then United States—thirty-five
square miles of permanent snowfields and ice. One step was all it took for someone
to fall into a slit of the Nisqually, the body never to be retrieved, part of the
mountain’s buried memories.

In Curtis, the lost men had stumbled upon a climber known as much for his ascents
on the high, unknown terra of the Pacific Northwest as for his leadership. They could
not have been luckier.

“Follow me.”

He guided them slowly upward, making sure they stayed close together and took small
steps, to his refuge at Camp Muir. He had hauled firewood over the previous days,
and built a rock shelter where he could stoke a blaze and get out of the wind. He
got the campfire going, and while sipping hot drinks the climbers revealed something
about themselves. They were from the East, from New York and Washington, D.C. Men
on a mission: studying the mountain for science, part of a campaign to give Rainier
formal protection, which would happen the following year when it became the nation’s
fifth national park. Yes, of course Curtis recognized their names, at least some of
them. He had rescued two of the most famous people in America.

The year before, Curtis had made national news—but not with his camera. The Mazamas,
one of the best organized of the climbing clubs sprouting in postfrontier America,
had ventured north from their home in Portland, Oregon, in the third week of July
to attempt a record: most people to summit Mount Rainier. The traveling group of two
hundred included women, in keeping with the progressive bent of the club, and several
scientists. Though the mountain had first been scaled twenty-eight years earlier,
it remained somewhat of a mystery. How active was the volcano? How thick were the
glaciers? What forms of life thrived in the year-round snow? Even the exact height
was in dispute, a question the Mazamas hoped to resolve. Among their members was Professor
Edgar McClure, a University of Oregon chemist who brought along a mercurial barometer
he planned to deploy on the summit as a way to settle the question of Rainier’s precise
elevation. “Never before has there been such an excursion,” the Portland
Oregonian
reported, and quoted a leader thusly as he informed those they met along the way:
“We were the pick and flower of Portland; our boys were all fleet of foot and strong
of limb and our girls were all young and handsome.”

The climbers arrived at Longmire, a base in the old-growth forest with hot springs
for bathing. Then it was upward and onward, by foot to a meadow at Paradise camp.
There, the climbers met a self-confident woman and her husband, an engaging, hyperkinetic
man loaded down with camera equipment: “A certain Mr. E .S. Curtis of Seattle,” the
Mazama journal noted. Clara, the mother of two young children, had no plans to aim
for the summit, but she loved tramping around the high country with her husband. Curtis
knew the mountain like his living room. He warned the climbers just before nightfall:
should they awaken to a sound—“a deep, hoarse roar”—it would be an avalanche, off
in the distance. Enjoy it, he said.

The expedition was a massive undertaking, involving four tons of gear, two beef steers,
seven milk cows, assorted beasts of burden and a brass band. That first night in Paradise,
Curtis was summoned to help with an emergency: a man from California, “not accustomed
to the dangerous vagaries of mountain storms in the Northwest,” in the Mazamas’ official
account, had gone missing. Curtis set off in the darkness without hesitation, his
wife unfazed. “Never shall I forget the heroic example that Mrs. Curtis gave us of
womanly courage when she bade her hushed goodbye as he started out into the fog, the
gale, and the dangerous darkness of the mountain the first night in camp,” wrote Dr.
Weldon Young, the team’s doctor. They found the frightened, shivering Californian
on snow two miles from camp. This rescue, and Curtis’s expertise on the mountain,
so impressed the Mazamas that they asked him to lead their expedition. Curtis agreed.
He also welcomed all female climbers who wanted to make a go for the top, and named
one young woman from Portland, Ella McBride, as a coleader. McBride was a schoolteacher,
with great stamina and athleticism that Curtis admired. Per a Mazama request, Curtis
gave in to one custom of the club: the ladies were required to wear bloomers.