Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (19 page)

Curtis tried a preemptive move: he used his influence with Francis Leupp, the commissioner
of Indian affairs, to arrange letters of transit, sent by telegram. Once these documents
arrived, Charlie Day and the Curtis party moved down into the thirty-mile-long Canyon
de Chelly for an extensive field session. Day had been appointed by the U.S. Department
of the Interior as a guardian of Anasazi treasures, and knew every wrinkle of the
canyon. Vandals and thieves were actively chiseling away the centuries of life left
behind in the cliffs. The stone apartments cut from the rock, so well preserved by
the protective canyon walls, looked as if their inhabitants had gone only days ago.

Curtis already had much of the material he needed for the Navajo section of Volume
I; a picture he had taken of Indians moving through the canyon two years earlier was
being hailed as a masterpiece. When John Ford went to Monument Valley some thirty
years later to shoot the first of his greatest westerns, he was building on the images
Curtis had produced in the Navajo living room: people dwarfed by cloud-piercing rock
walls and spires in the open West. On the 1906 trip, Curtis was looking for just enough
to fill out the rest of the first book, with Day helping to find subjects. “We made
camp in an oasis under cottonwood trees,” Curtis wrote, and then cast about in search
of faces that matched the terrain.

The sky was alive on those summer days. Afternoon temperatures of 105 degrees were
broken by electric storms and flash floods, the warm-season monsoons of the Southwest.
For the Curtis family of five, together at last in common purpose, the hours went
by at a pleasant pace. Florence was impressed by her father the cook, who would procure
fresh-butchered lamb from the Navajo and grill chops and corn over an open fire. With
this meal he usually served squaw bread made by people in the canyon. On days when
Justo wasn’t up to it, Curtis would prepare a big feast from scratch for the entire
team, including any natives who happened to be around. Their camp was always full
of Navajos, the women in rippling skirts and blouses made of velvet, the men with
bright scarves and thick, buckskin-soled shoes. “The Indians laughed inside and out,”
Curtis said, reflecting the joy he felt. Several hundred people lived full-time in
the canyon, tending to gardens watered by freshets from the thunderstorms, while others
moved through seasonally, in search of forage for sheep.

The Curtis children were fascinated by the turquoise jewelry makers, the rug weavers,
the sheepherders, the storytellers, the colors and sounds of the canyon, with its
sun-burnished walls of stone, the flanks streaked ocher and rust from the mineral-rich
water. The girls wore sun hats and frocks; Hal was dressed like a cowboy. They rode
mules and horses, collected horned frogs and small lizards, chased jackrabbits. They
climbed the cliffs with Charlie Day and their father to get a peek at those haunted
stone neighborhoods which had been abandoned eight hundred years earlier, and tried
to decipher petroglyphs, some dating back nearly three millennia. In their eyes, the
Shadow Catcher was the field general of all human activity in Canyon de Chelly. He
worked the audio recording machine, with Myers taking shorthand. Songs, legends, words
were catalogued. Curtis spoke enough of the language to force a smile from an old
native. As a horseman and a cliff climber, he was a springy athlete. And the things
that went on in the heat of the afternoon inside the tent—a makeshift studio—were
magical.

He took pictures not just in the low-angled light of dawn and dusk, when “nearly right”
was easy enough. Each hour of the sun could produce a different effect. He waited
for opportune weather. And he never used a flash, at least not in the Southwest. “Conditions
cannot be changed,” Curtis explained. “I must fit myself to them.”

One day in August, the canyon suddenly emptied of Indians, and a stillness fell over
the big crack in the earth. Charlie Day told the family to stay close to camp and
await his word. At night, the children heard chants bouncing along the thousand-foot-high
walls around them. The chants lasted till dawn, though they saw no people. Curtis
was at a loss to explain. When Day returned late at night, he said they were in trouble—they,
the Anglos. A woman was trying to give birth not far from the Curtis encampment, but
it was going badly. She was deep in labor, in terrible pain, bleeding profusely, but
the infant would not emerge. Medicine men were summoned. They tried traditional remedies,
to no avail. Then the Indians diagnosed the problem: it was the presence in the canyon
of white people taking pictures. Curtis immediately woke his family and started heaving
gear into the wagon. He told them they must leave immediately.

Groggy children snuggled in the wagon, their mumbled questions met by a shush from
their father. Horses were hitched in the dark as the chanting continued.
Flee,
Charlie Day ordered—quickly and quietly, and do not make contact with anyone along
the way.

“Pray the baby will live,” said Day. “There is no power on earth that will save you
and your family if it should die.”

He was exaggerating, surely, but as a cautionary measure. For the first time in nearly
eight years of concerted forays into Indian country, Curtis felt helpless and afraid,
at the mercy of his photo subjects. The family rode out of the canyon, a long, tremulous
climb, and made their way to Chinle, where word came through Day’s contacts that the
baby had lived. But what had started so blissfully for the family now broke down in
a prolonged spat between Curtis and his wife. The children’s lives had been put at
risk. How could he have done that? Great Mystery indeed. What did he really know about
these people? Curtis had no answers; it was a freakish thing, forget it. They would
reassemble again in another part of Indian country, next year, and the year after.
Let’s not let this one episode ruin the good days. But Clara was adamant: never again
would the entire family travel to Indian land. With the start of school approaching,
Clara and the children left for Seattle. Curtis stayed behind.

“Everything has to be kept on the move,” he said.

On to Third Mesa, in the Hopi Nation, where Curtis was in search of the Snake Society
once more. Crossing scabbed and pockmarked tableland in late summer was full of peril.
Washes, often bone-dry, could fill with red water in a flash, enough to float the
wagon. Coming from the maritime Northwest, where rain fell as soft and persistent
mist, Curtis was not used to such muscular meteorological mood changes. “The rain
pours down,” he said. “What was an arid desert when you made your evening camp is
soon a lake . . . And then comes the sand storm. No horse can travel against it. If
en route you can but turn your wagon to one side to furnish as much of a wind break
as possible, throw a blanket over your head and wait for its passing. It may be two
hours and it may be ten.” Overall, though, joy outweighed the misery. And when he
arrived at Old Oraibi, after a half-dozen previous visits, Curtis was greeted with
smiles from familiar faces—and a major piece of good news. On an earlier trip he had
been allowed to film the Snake Dance from a rooftop. Now Sikyaletstiwa agreed to let
him participate in that most important, extended prayer for water. He could go with
the priests to the fields to gather diamondback rattlesnakes, bring them to a kiva
and tend them, and be a part of the culminating dance.

There was some calculation on the Hopi side. It had been a summer of unrest, with
missionaries stepping up pressure to end the ritual and send Hopi children to a Christian
school. As it was, the Tewa and Hopi people who lived on the reservation felt overwhelmed—and
certainly surrounded—by the much larger Navajo population. Enlisting Curtis, at the
height of his influence, could help the cause of the traditionalists. During his visit
in 1905, Curtis had heard that members of the tiny Havasupai band to the north were
dying of hunger. He promptly sent word to Commissioner Leupp in Washington, and starvation
was averted (though tribal members continued to die from measles).

Curtis agreed to meet all requirements, and to perform his duties without balking.
First came days of fasting, to purify himself. Then the priests stripped and painted
their bodies in preparation for the snake hunt, which lasted four days. Those early
hours in the field, Curtis faced a trial that would reveal the depth of his dedication.
As the new priest, Curtis was told that he had a special task: to wrap the first captured
snake around his neck. It was tradition, or so they told Curtis. The Indians picked
up a big rattler and extended it to him. The snake hissed and bared its fangs, the
scaly skin touching the sun-bronzed neck of Curtis. He remained motionless, steeling
himself for the tightening around his throat, trying not to scare the rattler into
biting him. After a few long minutes, the snake uncoiled and was removed from his
neck. Curtis had passed his first test.

What he knew already was that the actual nine-day ceremony wasn’t so much a dance,
as it had been advertised by outfitters and the rail lines that brought tourists to
witness the public part of the spectacle, but “a dramatized prayer,” in Curtis’s words.
To the Hopi, snakes were messengers to the divine. The priests of the Snake Dance
order were the facilitators. In the kiva, the curling and hissing rattlers were washed
to make them clean for the Hopi prayer. For nine nights, Curtis slept within a few
feet of the snakes, either in the kiva or on the rim of the dugout home. On the day
of the big dance, a congregant smeared paint on his cheeks, his forehead, his neck,
chest and back. He removed all his clothes and dressed in a simple cloth covering
his genitals. Crowds massed along the edge of the village, tourists and natives, ten
deep in places. The snakes were lifted from the kiva to a central place. The crowd
moved in tighter. Priests began to dance, picking snakes as partners, singing prayers
and incantations. Curtis, waiting in the wings, held back, hiding from view. At the
last moment, he balked. He knew the audience was stocked with missionaries and government
agents; he could tell by looking at them, taking notes for possible prosecution. He
recognized Anglo faces. His presence, the great Shadow Catcher, the first white man
ever allowed to participate as a priest in the Snake Dance order, would be widely
disparaged in official circles and reported in the popular press. After six visits,
over six years, studying and photographing every part of the ceremony, getting to
know the religious leaders and then becoming a priest himself—at this culmination
of his quest he worried that, should he take the final step, he might undermine the
most significant event of the Hopi religion.

“I was fortunate enough to be able to go through the whole snake ceremony,” he wrote
his editor Hodge, “. . . in fact doing everything that a Snake man would do except
take part in the Snake dance. The only reason I did not do this was because I feared
newspaper publicity and missionary criticism.” He was also troubled by the earlier
events of the summer. What had happened to Goshonné, the Apache medicine man, after
he had spilled the secrets of the tribe’s creation myths, and the scare of the last
day in Canyon de Chelly, had told Curtis much about the balancing act of his work.
He had gone deep into the culture of a people that Americans had never understood,
deep enough to realize—even at this moment of triumph—that there were places where
he did not belong.

C
URTIS WINCED AT
the stabbing questions of a writer facing the most terrifying of prospects: a blank
page. Where to begin? How to tell the story? What exactly was he trying to say? Had
his sole job been the photographer assembling an epic of images, it would have been
much simpler. But words were something else. He’d been published in
Scribner’s,
yes, and a handful of other magazines, and had given enough lectures to be confident
he could hold an audience rapt. With the first book, he had to reach for something
sturdy and authoritative, and that realization brought on writer’s block. As Morgan
had said, he was best suited to put down the words; he was the “photo-historian,”
so called by the newspapers, a dual responsibility—too much, perhaps. He forced pen
to paper now under the lengthening shadows of thick oaks in Arizona, late in a season
that had taken him from the Apache homes in the White Mountains to the Jicarilla Apache
communities in New Mexico, with numerous other stops in between.

THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN
Being a series of volumes picturing and describing
the Indians of the United States and Alaska, written,
illustrated and published by Edward S. Curtis.