Read Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher Online
Authors: Timothy Egan
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher
8. The Artist and His Audience
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.
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.
1. First Picture—
CROWFOOT BLACKFEET
1896
T
HE 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.
