Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (22 page)

With Upshaw’s words rattling around his head, Curtis tried to find a middle ground.
Privately, his thoughts were moving toward those of his Crow crew member. “As to his
being a savage: if we are to take the general definition of the word, there were no
savages in North America at the time Columbus landed, as they all had a religion,
notwithstanding statements to the contrary by the early explorers and priests,” he
wrote in a note from the field for the Morgan archives. In the published book of Volume
I, he editorialized in places, despite his promise not to revisit the many indignities.
“With advancing civilization,” Curtis wrote of the Apache, “they seem to have gathered
all the evils of our life and taken little of the good.” By contrast, the Navajo “have
been the least affected by civilizing influences,” he said in a tone that was clearly
celebratory. “The Navajo is the American Bedouin, the chief human touch in the great
plateau-desert region of our Southwest, acknowledging no superior, paying allegiance
to no king in name of chief, a keeper of flocks and herds who asks nothing of the
Government but to be unmolested in his pastoral life and the religion of his forebears.”

He scorned government agents for trying to force the mountainous Apache to become
farmers, an absurd proposition in a harsh land. “No tribe is more capable of living
on natural products.” And he did use both “primitive” and “savage,” though with the
first word it was almost always as a compliment, and the second was employed to describe
bounty hunters paid by the Mexican government to lift Apache scalps—women’s and children’s
included. In the end, the book was mostly practical and matter-of-fact. For instance,
he gave a recipe for how to make strong beer from mescal, the Apache way.

Curtis decamped to New York, to the Hotel Belmont, just across the street from Grand
Central Terminal, for the final publishing push in June of 1907. “I have the material
for the first two volumes practically in shape and will be able to turn it over to
the printers in the near future,” he wrote Morgan. The financier was still in Europe,
buying art and precious objects with his latest mistress, as a crumbling stock market
prompted urgent cables for his return to New York. In Italy, he was a walking bank.
Even in the shrine city of Assisi, Franciscan monks who had taken a vow of poverty
tried to entice Morgan to share some of his fortune on their behalf. He bought an
autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s last violin sonata (No. 10 in G Major), and focused
his freight-train gaze on a number of Botticelli paintings.

In Morgan’s absence, young Belle da Costa Greene handled correspondence and controlled
acquisitions for the library. She had moved her office to the new marble and limestone
palace, and with her active social life was a frequent subject of gossip in the papers.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that it really must be grudgingly admitted that I am
the most interesting person in New York,” she wrote, “for it’s all they seem to talk
about.” Pleaders from all levels of the arts world made frequent calls. Curtis saw
Greene in New York, and though he may have been as intoxicated as anyone in her presence,
his correspondence with her in 1907 was all business. As per their agreement, he presented
Miss Greene with the master prints and promised twenty-five copies of the first volume
at year’s end.

With the evanescent Belle Greene, with Harriman and his crowd in Manhattan, with Roosevelt
and Pinchot in Washington, with the gentlemen of the National Geographic Society and
others who put on black ties and silk gowns to look at lantern slides of Indians in
buckskin, Edward Curtis was a man without a breath of doubt—the tall, reservation-trotting,
horse-whispering westerner in his Abercrombie and Fitch. But to his few close friends,
Curtis was a different man, still not completely free of the homesteader’s shack and
the humility of foraging to make a living. He distrusted scholars in particular, and
it seemed as if everyone he encountered in academia knew he was a grade school dropout.
The exception was Professor Meany, who shared all of Curtis’s enthusiasms and none
of his insecurities. At a moment just before publication, when Curtis should have
been at his most confident, he told Meany he wondered if he was up to this task and
expressed fear, again, of ending up in debtor’s hell. The biggest educational institution
in the Northwest, the University of Washington, continued to balk at buying a subscription
for the work of its native son. The same was true of a handful of Seattle barons,
men who had made themselves wealthy in the early-century boom of one of the fastest-growing
cities in the world.

“Of late I have had little but swats from my home town and feel in a most disagreeable
mood,” Curtis wrote Meany in a lengthy, multipage rant. “Most of those who say good
things about the work would if I owed them two and a half and could not pay on the
dot kick my ass and say, ‘Get to hell out of this.’ Yes, I will try to cheer up a
bit, but when I think of some of the Seattle bunch I go mad. I am an unknown man trying
by sheer bulldog tenacity to carry through a thing so large that no one else cared
to tackle it.” Meany again assured him that time would be his ally—the ages would
remember him, even if the wealthy of his hometown would not. “The newly rich of Seattle,”
Meany wrote Curtis, “are foolish enough to neglect the chance of aiding one of the
greatest literary achievements of the century.” His advice was to ignore them, to
get back into the field as soon as possible, to “just run along and play.”

But before he could play, he had to sell at least a handful of subscriptions. In Chicago,
he visited Edward Ayers, a man of means and a founder of the city’s prestigious Field
Museum. Ayers considered himself an expert on Indians and also was the main benefactor
of the museum’s library—not a good combination, in Curtis’s experience.
The North American Indian
should have been a natural acquisition for him. But Ayers turned up his nose at the
photographer. He doubted that Curtis could break any new ground with the text; perhaps
the pictures would be diverting. And, as Curtis had heard many a time, he’d bitten
off more than he could chew. Ayers “thinks I have attempted too big a task for one
man, saying, ‘It looks to me as though you were trying to do 50 men’s work,’” Curtis
wrote Hodge. He hoped his editor could use his influence among the small circle of
museum executives to nudge the Chicago man along. Ayers was unconvinced. “After 30
years in studying this question, and the mass of literature I have read on the subject,
I am still in doubt about the value of the historical part of your work,” he wrote.

Besides that doubt, Ayers had to be concerned about the chilling effects of the Panic
of 1907. In the fall, the country appeared on the verge of collapse. Roosevelt was
perplexed. The markets continued to plummet. A global credit shortage added to the
deep freeze. Morgan steamed home, his latest acquisitions in steerage. He summoned
the richest men in the nation, Rockefellers, Fricks and Guggenheims among them, to
his library for a summit on how to save capitalism. Under the eyes of Renaissance
portraits, and facing Morgan’s mottled nose, the choreographers of great capital listened
to his plan. In order to stop the Bankers’ Panic they had to stall the run on banks.
He threatened to go after brokers who short-sold stock, trying to drive down prices
for later purchase. He pledged to use his own money to shore up the banking system,
urging others to follow suit. When they did so, after a nervous few weeks, confidence
slowly returned to the markets. Morgan, performing the role that the Federal Reserve
would play later, had saved the system, for now.

In the depths of the crisis, Curtis prepared to see his benefactor and present him
with a collection he hoped would rival anything Morgan dragged home from Europe. With
Myers and Phillips wandering over fresh territory in the West, the business end of
the Curtis project moved into the “publication office” of
The North American Indian
in New York. There, Curtis spent many a night in rumpled clothes, at times falling
asleep after a long tussle over his finances and the direction of his life work. He
wrote to Morgan that he’d been through quite a bit of “blood sweating” bringing the
first two volumes to the finish line, “but I’m glad to say, no delay.” He outlined
the work ahead with the Sioux and beyond, and reiterated his gratitude. The fact that
Morgan could bother with Indian pictures when the global financial system and a big
part of the Morgan empire were on the verge of ruin was not lost on Curtis. “I hesitate
in troubling you with even the briefest letter in hours like these when you seem to
have the burden of the whole land to carry. And let me say what millions know and
would like to clasp your hand and say to you: you have saved the country when no one
else could.” Whether Belle da Costa Greene passed the note on to Morgan is not clear.
He said nothing in reply.

Curtis was used to getting good press. But when two volumes printed on handmade Dutch
etching stock called Van Gelder and a thin Japanese vellum—one of 161 pages, 79 photogravure
plates and a portfolio of 39 separate plates, the other of 142 pages, 75 plates and
35 of the supplemental pictures—at last came to light in late 1907 and early 1908,
the acclaim was seismic. In appearance and texture, the books were among the most
luxurious ever printed. The images were done in sepia tones, from acid-etched copper
plates produced by John Andrew & Son in Boston and printed by Cambridge University
Press. Critics hailed a genius who made publishing history. His pictures were better
than fine oil paintings. His text would be used for hundreds of years to come—a literary,
artistic, historical masterpiece.

“Nothing just like it has ever before been attempted for any people,” said the
New York Times.
“He has made text and pictures interpret each other, and both together present a
more vivid, faithful and comprehensive view of the North American Indian as he is
to-day than has ever been made before or can possibly be made again . . . In artistic
value the photogravures are worthy of very great praise. They are beautiful reproductions
of photographs that in themselves are works of art . . . And when it all is finished
it will be a monumental work, marvelous for the unstinted care and labor and pains
that have gone into the making, remarkable for the beauty of its final embodiment,
and highly important because of its historical and ethnographic value.”

A rival paper went further. “The most gigantic undertaking since the making of the
King James edition of the Bible,” said the
New York Herald.
“The real, savage Indian is fast disappearing or becoming metamorphosed into a mere
ordinary, uninteresting imitation of the white man. It is probably safe to say that
Mr. Curtis knows more about the real Indians than any other white man.” And overseas,
where that Bible had been recast, came similar waves of praise. The first two volumes
“are among the finest specimens of the printer’s art in the world,” wrote the head
of the Guildhall Library in London, which had purchased set number 7. “One special
reason why the photographs will be more appreciated in England perhaps than America
is because
The North American Indian
is more of a novelty to us.”

Curtis was put on the same pedestal as John James Audubon and George Catlin. “We do
not recall any enterprise of a literary sort ever undertaken in America that can compare
for splendor of typography and for historical value with that which is just now undertaken
by Mr. Edward S. Curtis,” wrote the
Independent,
an American paper. “For contents, the work recalls no other similar enterprise but
Audubon’s monumental ‘Birds of America.’”

From Chicago, where Curtis had struck out with the founder of the Field Museum, more
kudos rolled his way. “It is the most wonderful publishing enterprise ever undertaken
in America,” wrote
Unity Magazine.
“If it ever comes our turn to vacate the continent, may we have as able an interpreter
and as kindly and skillful an artist to preserve us for the great future.”

In this case, superlative reviews meant nothing to the average reader, since the book
was not for sale. It could not be found in any store, and could be seen in only a
handful of libraries, by appointment. Morgan was sitting on twenty-five copies, a
plurality of the original printing, for Curtis had failed to get anywhere near the
number of subscriptions he needed. Curtis made sure that Belle da Costa Greene and
President Roosevelt saw the notices. And in his letter to Hodge about the raves, he
apologized that he wouldn’t be able to pay him, not just yet, the money he owed for
editing. Perhaps the reviews would help with a few reluctant institutions. In any
event, Curtis had had his fill of the East Coast. His mind was in Montana, and the
Battle of the Little Bighorn, there for the Indian side, yet to be told in full, a
story that might destroy the reputation of an American hero.