Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (42 page)

The problem was the man behind the creation. For long periods at the end of the 1920s,
Curtis fell into the black hole that had engulfed him after his divorce. For weeks
that became months, he could not bring himself to write or to make prints from the
plates holding those extraordinary images of an Alaskan summer. He was ashamed of
his paralysis and would hide from everyone save his children. Adding to his mental
torture, he was in constant physical pain. A man who had crisscrossed the continent
125 times could no longer walk a single block without sharp stabs; on some mornings,
getting out of bed was a chore, though he was not an old man by any standard. “I am
still suffering with my lame hip and do not get on with matters as fast as I could
like,” he wrote Hodge in early 1928, the only hint of his inner demons passed off
as all the fault of his gimpy leg.

He was desperate for Bill Myers, who had carried him through so many obstacles in
the drama of bookmaking. They had fallen completely out of touch. All Curtis knew
was that Myers was managing an apartment building in San Francisco, for a small salary.
“Have you heard anything from Myers?” Curtis asked Hodge in 1929. “I have not been
able to get track of him.” But with help from Eastwood’s pen and the incalculable
skill of Hodge, Curtis assembled his last two works.

He did what he could with Volume XIX, mostly portraits, and histories that took a
long view of the Indian diaspora in Oklahoma. Many of the subjects look like costume
Indians, reluctantly wearing deerskin leggings and bonnets in the hot sun. In a candid
photographic nod, he gives in to contemporary life. One picture in particular,
Wilbur Peebo—Comanche,
is a striking departure, and shows the long arc of the Lords of the Plains, from
unassailable horse soldiers to passive residents of a listless twentieth century.
Wilbur Peebo is seen in a white dress shirt and tie, his hair close-cropped, slicked
and parted, a regular Rotarian. Yet even that picture is true to an emotion: a pleasant
face that conveys a deep level of hurt. The close-ups—the portraits, that is—are consistent
with the quality of the previous eighteen volumes.

Curtis felt he had done a fair job of “making something from nothing,” as he told
Hodge when the first drafts were put together. 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’d described 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 dusk 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.”

Curtis described a Cheyenne, age forty-eight, educated at the Carlisle School Upshaw
had attended, who became a drunk. He deserted his family, quit his job at a hospital,
was run over by a wagon. He eventually found salvation and sobriety in the spiritual
disciplines of the Peyote Society. “Within a few years of joining the peyote organization
he has become one of the most substantial men of the tribe.” Curtis ripped into the
government for harassing Indians who sought to connect with their past in this way.
“Worshipers have been arrested, indicted, and tried in state courts.” But since Indians
were now citizens, they should be protected by the First Amendment—the peyote cult,
he wrote, was the Native American church.

With the Alaska volume, Curtis was magnificent, bringing home a book as original,
humane and surprising as his best work on the Hopi or the Nez Perce. The exuberance
of his handwritten log fully carried over to the typeset pages and printed images
of the final book. What made the Eskimos—except for those ravaged by the flu epidemic
on Little Diomede Island—so different from the Indians Curtis had visited over the
past thirty years was that they’d escaped the worst curse of the West, those genocidal
diseases. For most of North America, the devastation was consistent, Curtis wrote,
from the Southwest to the Northwest, from the California coast to the Great Plains.
“A notable exception was found in the natives of Nunivak Island, whose almost total
freedom from Caucasian contact has thus far been their salvation,” he wrote. “In all
the author’s experience among Indians and Eskimos, he never knew a happier and more
thoroughly honest and self-reliant people.” Curtis put the number of Alaska natives
at 12,405—a healthy population. He described how they made parkas from bird or fish
skins, and heavier coats of caribou and bear hide. Their socks were woven grass; a
rain slicker was fashioned from seal intestine. The people were tattooed and pierced
and handsome—as his pictures showed—save for that dirty community of Hooper Bay. He
was as harsh toward them in the book as he was in his diary. “Uncleanliness of person
and possessions is the rule; the floors of dwellings are deep in filth and refuse
of every description.” Most of the pictures are portraits of delight: laughing children
in duck-skin parkas, alluring women in the angled light of midnight, limber young
men launching boats for a whale hunt. He was so intrigued by the design of kayaks
that he included illustrations of how they were built. And the songs: parts of the
final volume can seem like the outline of a musical.

In a brief introduction, Curtis was grateful to those who believed in him through
the years, the people “who never lost faith,” named and unnamed. “Mere thanks seem
hollow in comparison with such loyal cooperation; but great is the satisfaction the
writer enjoys when he can at last say to all those whose faith has been unbounded,
‘It is finished.’”

Curtis told a friend that he still held out hope of selling a couple of subscriptions,
and with that money he could start something fresh. He was interested in the history
of gold, and in further travel. He was sixty-one years old when he finished Volume
XX in 1929, and he thought there was another act or two ahead for himself. Hodge was
happy with the polished draft. But as they put the closing touches on the last words
and pictures of
The North American Indian,
the nation took a turbulent turn. On October 29, the stock market crashed, the worst
single day on Wall Street to that point. And the bottom was not around the corner;
over the next three weeks, the market lost 40 percent of its value. Though less than
5 percent of Americans owned stock, the crash had a downward-spiraling effect on confidence,
and it gutted thousands of banks holding the life savings of average people—money
bet and lost in the market in a deregulatory free fall. By year’s end, unemployment
had tripled. Universities, museums, the rich: nobody was immune from the crash.

When the final volume of the Indian work had been printed in 1930, Curtis faced the
only thing worse than a bad review: silence. He longed for a word or two from the
papers that had once given full pages to him. His own personal collapse came two years
earlier than the nation’s, starting on the day he was thrown in jail. That he had
completed the work at all was astounding to those closest to him. After he finished
the thirty-year, twenty-set book, the only comment from Curtis to his editor was cursory.
“I am in bad shape again,” he wrote Hodge in a hand-scrawled note on lined paper that
looked like the scribbling of a child. “Going from my bed to my working table is about
my limit at present.”

Curtis moved to Denver and checked into a long-term-care hospital, as a charity case.
He withdrew from the central figures of his life for almost two years, though he did
dash off notes to his children. Then, in early 1932, he reached out to the two constants
over the course of his magnum opus: Edmond Meany and Belle da Costa Greene. To Meany,
stalwart companion for three decades, who was tolerant of his silent spells and his
lapses in meeting the basic responsibilities of friendship, he told of the pain and
pathos that had visited him, and lamented that he was already a forgotten man. Meany,
writing back, relayed news of his own troubles: he’d been in a terrible car accident,
tearing up his knee. He could no longer hike, and could not walk without a cane. He
assured Curtis that his work would grow in stature with the years: “The last two volumes
of your monumental work have caused distinct revival here of talk about you . . .
I can sympathize with your last sentence about feeling ‘a bit lost.’ You can rest
assured that you and your books will be rediscovered through centuries of time.”

Meany was being kind. If there was talk in Seattle of a Curtis revival, it was limited
to a very small circle. In closing, he compared Curtis to other artists who had been
broke, sick and depressed: “Unfortunately, this has too often been the fate of other
great achievers in the realm of music, art, books and explorations. Belated honors
are vicarious compensations.”

The letter to Greene was blunt and needy, Curtis confiding in her as he did in Meany.
She held all the power now at the Morgan Library, where she reigned as the director
with full backing of the board of trustees.

My Dear Miss Greene:

Much water has passed beneath all bridges since we last exchanged a word or letter.
It is years since I have been in New York . . . How many times have I wished that
Mr. Morgan might have lived to see completion of the work and know something of its
standing as a completed undertaking . . . Following my season in the Arctic collecting
final material for Volume Twenty, I suffered a complete physical breakdown. For two
years, I was about a 99 percent loss. Ill health and uncertainty as to how I was to
solve the problem of the future brought a period of depression which about crushed
me . . . I am again in a measure physically fit and have much of my old courage back.
During the long months of despondency I could not write to my friends; no one wants
to listen to the wail of lost souls, or to the down and outers.

He was right on the last point. Greene and the Morgan Library had lost interest in
the man who had once been their most famous living beneficiary. Curtis had closed
with a simple request: “I am again writing and hoping I may do something worthwhile.
Do drop me a line; even a word from my old friends gives added courage.” She did not
bother with a reply.

Belle da Costa Greene filed the letter away with the other papers, and thousands of
pictures, in the Curtis trove—darkened, covered, closed. As it turned out, the Indians
that Curtis spent his adult life documenting had never faded away. It was
The North American Indian
that disappeared.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1948, the Seattle Historical Society asked a retired librarian named Harriet Leitch
to assess a set of books that had just been donated by a wealthy widow, Sophie Frye
Bass. The history buffs were not sure of their value, or what to make of them. The
acquisition was not a complete set, just eight volumes. Still, they were luminous,
these large-format books and folios of silky vellum, the pictures bringing their Indian
subjects to life.

For Leitch, it was like finding the Seven Cities of Cibola. A beloved figure, once
voted Librarian of the Year by her colleagues, she had certainly heard about
The North American Indian,
though sightings were rare. There were perhaps only five of the fully bound twenty-volume
sets in Seattle. One was at the city’s main library, another at the University of
Washington, residing at last in its logical home after Professor Meany’s ceaseless
work to convince the school of its merit. A third was listed as belonging to Colonel
Alden Blethen, the
Seattle Times
publisher who had died more than three decades earlier. A fourth was held by the
Stimson family, who’d made a fortune in timber and was now building a broadcast empire.
And the eccentric railroad man Samuel Hill was a subscriber during his time in Seattle.

As Leitch ran her fingers over the fine photogravures, the handset letterpress text
printed on heavy stock, the leather binding and gilt edging, and gazed into the eyes
of people who looked as if they sprang from some musty American storage chest, she
wondered what had become of the architect of this exquisite construction of biblio-art.
The last entry in the Seattle Public Library’s clipping file was from 1927, when Curtis
was jailed and hauled before a judge. The family had disappeared. No one was left
in the region. She found a contact for Beth, who was still running a Curtis studio
on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Leitch wrote and explained her current task,
with a few basic queries: