Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (10 page)

On the day Joseph arrived in Seattle, Meany put him up at the Lincoln Hotel and said
he would try to find a car to drive him to the game. The press would surely want a
picture of that. Seven years after Angeline’s death, just having an Indian in the
city—any Indian—was a curiosity. Seattle had bulged to 150,000 people and was growing
like blackberry bramble in midsummer; the roads were lined with horse-drawn carriages,
streetcars, bicycles and sputtering automobiles. Mechanical sluicing machines and
hoses hissed around the clock, leveling the hills. And down in Pioneer Square, a large
cedar totem pole, carved by Tlingit Indians, was erected as the centerpiece for the
historic heart of the city.

Meany introduced Joseph to the only other man in Seattle who knew as much about native
people as he did—the portrait photographer with the studio downtown. And in Curtis
the old chief found a motivated listener. They were the same height, well over six
feet, though separated by thirty years. Curtis asked Joseph about his distinctive
hairstyle, a combed-back upsweep rising several inches above his forehead, with long
braids on his chest. In Nez Perce culture, Joseph explained, a man who had fought
the enemy many times, or had scalped a living man, was entitled to this kind of proud,
showy display. He talked about how much he and his fellow native northwesterners hated
their exile in Oklahoma, where it was hot, dry, flat and windswept when it wasn’t
cold, tornado-lashed, hail-pelted or barren. His people had starved there, and longed
to see green forests and blue mountains. But the most revealing thing the chief told
Curtis was about the Nez Perce War of 1877. Contrary to what had been accepted by
most historians, Joseph was not the Indian Napoleon. He was not a crafty general,
or even a particularly good warrior. There were other Nez Perce who planned the attacks.
Joseph simply tried to hold his people together, to speak for them and argue for a
resolution that would prevent total annihilation. The fact that they had eluded the
cavalry for so long was due to luck and guile, not good generalship.

Curtis was astonished: the official story was wrong. Here was another chance to correct
the record. And he was moved by the saga. Who could hear of the last hundred years
of the Nez Perce—from rescuing Lewis and Clark at a time when they were starving,
to being chased down as outlaws through the first national park—and not feel that
a tremendous injustice had been done? But Curtis had vowed to Grinnell and in print
at the start of his pictorial odyssey not to revisit Indian political fights or to
get into contemporary clashes over treaty rights. The stories of mistreatment, lies
and betrayal were not worth rehashing. He wanted more than anything to take Joseph’s
picture.

Would the Nez Perce leader sit for him? Joseph demurred. He would think about it.
Curtis pleaded. Take a look, he suggested, at the work he had already done on the
Nez Perce, some of it on the walls of his studio. One picture was a full-body portrait
of a child no more than a few months old, tightly wrapped in painted buckskin against
a wood backboard with a flower drawing on it, entitled
Nez Perce Babe,
from 1900. In that face was the future of Joseph’s people. Another picture showed
an adult man in all his glory. He had the good looks that the Nez Perce were known
for, with a fine, prominent nose, a strong jaw and full-flowing hair, swept back from
his brow in the way Joseph wore his, braids exposed down to the middle of his chest.
His was not the face of a dying race or a conquered people, and it epitomized the
positive feelings that Curtis had of this tribe. He labeled it
Typical Nez Perce,
from 1899.

OLD CHIEF LIKES CITY,
MEETS A FAMOUS INDIAN ARTIST
THEN TAKES A BATH

His every move was front-page news, even if the tone was patronizing and superficial
in the extreme. Curtis was referred to in the
Post-Intelligencer
as a “professional Indian tamer,” akin to a man who could calm lions in a circus
tent. The centerpiece of Joseph’s visit to Seattle was a speech, sold out for weeks
in advance, that the Nez Perce leader was to deliver at the city’s largest auditorium
on Saturday night. But there was something else on the calendar that November weekend
that had people in a frenzy: the football showdown. “The championship of a stretch
of country from the Rockies to the sea lay in the balance,” the
Seattle Times
noted. “It was an important contest, beside which the corruption of the steel trust,
the robbery of a canal or the polypus in an emperor’s larynx sinks into insignificance.”
The 1903 Sun Dodgers of the University of Washington were in the midst of an unbeaten
season. November 20 was the big match with Nevada. Joseph’s hosts had concocted an
idea that would bring the two worlds together: perhaps the Indian chief would like
to watch the region’s biggest football game? But how would this help him return to
the Wallowas? And why would a contest with an odd-shaped pigskin be more significant
than all the major news of the day? What could it possibly mean for the Nez Perce,
or even for the polyp in the emperor’s throat?

On Friday afternoon, game day, Joseph boarded a streetcar to make his way up the
steep hill from downtown to the field on Capitol Hill. The chief, accompanied by Meany,
was led to the Washington sideline, where he was handed three cigars. The game was
a ferocious defensive battle: players without face protection slammed into cold mud,
bones crunching on many of the tackles, blood splattering. The crowd did an Indian
chant—common at Sun Dodger games—“Skookum, Skookum! Washington!” Newspaper stories
said the chief watched the game in stony silence: “his face never changed expression
except when the ball was kicked, and then he appeared to laugh.” Late in the fourth
quarter, Washington got a safety. The 2–0 score held, and the Sun Dodgers—later known
as the Huskies—emerged triumphant, kings of the Pacific Coast.

NEZ PERCE CHIEF SEES FIRST FOOTBALL
SMILES THREE TIMES

After the game, Joseph was asked his impressions of this wildly popular American sport,
a game that was coming under fire for its excessive violence and serious injuries.
Joseph spoke for nearly a minute to Meany, who translated.

“I saw a lot of white men almost fight today,” Joseph said. “I do not think this is
good.”

The address, the following day, was a disappointment. Joseph appeared tired, his posture
showing his weariness. He did not engage the audience. He did not tell war stories,
or give accounts of derring-do, or offer details about fighting white soldiers in
Yellowstone National Park, or explain how his people survived for so long on so little
food, or drop the names of presidents and other important people he had met over the
years. He spoke entirely in his own language, and what he had to say was the narrative
of people who were always good to the Americans and had been betrayed for their friendliness.
His life was full of broken promises. He wanted his homeland back. He wanted to return
to ground rightfully belonging to the Nez Perce. “A lot of grunts” was how one of
the papers summarized his talk.

On his last day in Seattle, Joseph went with Meany to visit Curtis again at his studio
on Second Avenue. Three Knives had talked him into it: the chief would sit for a Curtis
portrait. Curtis had watched Joseph’s speech on Saturday, the audience growing restless
when the chief failed to show up at the scheduled time, and then sitting on their
hands while he explained the plight of the Nez Perce in words none of them could understand.
Curtis had been moved by the chief’s quiet charisma, on his insistence on returning
to the Wallowas, and he was convinced that the tribe had been robbed. He made plans
to visit Joseph at the Colville reservation, to study Nez Perce ways, record their
language on his wax cylinder and shoot pictures of the tribe.

In a studio stuffed with Navajo rugs and Hopi baskets, Curtis had the chief sit with
Meany and Red Thunder. They were entertained by ten-year-old Harold Curtis, called
Hal, getting a glimpse of how his father worked with native subjects. Curtis tried
to find the man in the face, experimenting with the light, studying the angles. The
chief looked worn, older than his years, gloomy, and it seemed to Curtis that much
of the life was drained from him. Curtis took a few shots of Joseph and his nephew
sitting down, shrunken in their seats, Meany standing over them in the middle. All
three men are glowering. Then Curtis had the chief sit by himself, and he tried a
number of poses. One was with feathered headdress, looking directly into the camera,
a shot later finished as a photogravure titled
Joseph—Nez Perce.
This portrait shows him with a dozen rows of shell necklaces, the traditional bonnet
tied beneath his chin, no hair visible. The chief is frowning. His gaze is distant.
Then a second portrait, this one with the full upsweep of Joseph’s hair, no headdress.
The light is less gauzy, more harsh, the stare intense, the frown still there but
somewhat empathetic. The picture shows even more of the topography of Joseph’s extraordinary
face: scars and nicks, prominent lines formed from habitual sorrow. He’s wearing two
large shell earrings, each bigger than a silver dollar. This photogravure was also
titled
Joseph—Nez Perce.
It has multiple dimensions and conveys multiple emotions: that stare, those eyes,
that hair, that mouth. It is unforgiving, without a hint of artifice, full of life
even as Joseph neared his death.

When Joseph returned to the reservation, the long winter siege had already taken
hold of the little village of Nespelem, Washington. He told his family that his bones
ached, his rheumatism was acting up, and he had trouble sleeping. He said, “I shall
live to see one more snow.” He died the following year, on September 21, 1904, never
having returned to the Wallowas. In keeping with Nez Perce custom, Joseph’s widow
cut her hair short; she would not be allowed to remarry until it once again touched
her shoulders. He was buried under a mound of stones not far from the geologic scar
of the Grand Coulee, with a simple rock cairn atop it. It was widely reported that
Joseph, in the estimation of the reservation doctor, had died of a broken heart.

“Well, our old friend Chief Joseph has passed on,” Curtis wrote to Meany a few weeks
later. “At last his long, endless fight for his return to the old home is at end.
For some strange reason, the thought of the old fellow’s life and death gives me rather
a feeling of sadness.” He had interviewed more than a dozen Nez Perce after first
meeting Joseph, and felt that he understood his place and their place in history.
Bill Cody had called him “the greatest Indian American ever,” but Curtis was more
specific in his assessment: “Perhaps he was not quite what we in our minds had pictured
him, but I still think he was one of the greatest men that has ever lived.” It was
significant that Curtis did not qualify his last statement with “Indian”—Joseph was
a great man, regardless of his race.

The restraints on the Nez Perce, members of a conquered nation living by the fiat
of a faraway government, were felt even among the smallest of other tribes at the
time of Joseph’s death. When Curtis went to see the Havasupai on his summer trip in
1903, he heard the same kinds of complaints he had heard on the Colville reservation.
For that trip, he traveled again by train to the heart of Arizona Territory, and then
by coach and horseback to the high plateau in the north, to where it dropped into
the Grand Canyon. From the great chasm’s edge, he hired a mule, which was loaded with
his gear, and hiked with a translator down the narrow trail, dropping more than three
thousand vertical feet over nine miles, stepping gently over crushed pebbles and knuckle-sized
stones through tiers of time wearing the colors of different ages, at last reaching
the village of Supai, home of the People of the Blue-Green Water. “The strangest dwelling
place of any tribe in America,” Curtis called it. They had lived in the most remote
area of the United States for about seven hundred years, the natives told Curtis,
and been relatively undisturbed. Yes, they had trouble with the Navajo—who didn’t?
When Kit Carson burned the Navajo peach orchards to the ground and marched those Diné,
as the tribe called itself, off to exile in New Mexico, the Havasupai were left untouched.
They were too small a tribe to bother with, hidden in a deep pocket of the Colorado
Plateau. Over the years, few whites had visited: a Spanish missionary, Father Garces,
dropped into the canyon in 1776, and an American explorer, Frank Cushing, came along
more than a hundred years later. They found well-watered little gardens of squash,
beans and corn, and a tribe that wanted to be left alone. By the start of the twentieth
century, the Havasupai were penciled into a tiny reservation just off the floor of
the Grand Canyon, less than a single square mile. The Indians were tired of being
told how to live and what to do by government agents—a familiar complaint in the Southwest.
But they were powerless to do anything because of their peculiar limbo status: neither
citizens nor foreign nationals. “We are no longer men,” a Havasupai leader told Curtis.
“We are like little children. We must always ask Washington.”

What Curtis saw of the Havasupai was not a healthy people. Measles had started to
ravage the tribe, killing the young, especially. They feared going hungry after their
hunting range had been severely restricted. Curtis counted 250 tribal members. He
recorded their language, wrote down their songs on staff paper, took pictures of families
living in an extraordinary setting. The way the Blue-Green Water People had fashioned
homes into the cliffs of the slot canyon in particular drew his photographic eye.

During the same trip to Arizona, Curtis went to see the Hopi and the Navajo. He tried
again to get permission to participate in the Snake Dance. And again the head of the
Snake Society, Sikyaletstiwa, turned him down. But the priest was friendly enough
with Curtis that he let him take his picture. By this time, Curtis was referred to
by one of his many nicknames, The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath, because of the air
mattress he inflated at camp.