Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (5 page)

After a prayer, up into the clouds they went in single file, accompanied by a slow-trudging,
often slipping group of musicians carrying heavy instruments. Just before dusk, when
they reached the snow camp named for the naturalist John Muir, the party was ordered
by Curtis to cook up soup and stew, then bed down before nightfall. The brass band
played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all went to sleep. They rose a few hours later,
just after midnight, stomping their calked boots on compressed ice, a fat moon overhead,
blankets wrapped around their upper bodies. Frozen lips pressed against frigid mouthpieces
as the band tried to give their Mazama partners a tuneful sendoff. The first hour
was all doubts and cold hands, Curtis encouraging the climbers to stay positive: it
would get better after sunrise. They had so many questions:
What should they eat?
Very little. Their stomachs would be turbulent from the altitude.
How slippery would the ice be?
Hard, until midday.
Are there many crevasses?
Numerous ones, some hidden by snow bridges, deep and dangerous. Prod first with the
alpenstock before taking a step.

The push to the summit was a steady march past monoliths of rotten rock and aged ice.
Sunrise came with a burst of rose-colored light and a view of the long blue wall of
the Cascade range just to the east. As the day went on, the sun softened the snow,
making it difficult to walk. The altitude made several climbers sick; they dug into
the snow to wait out the climb. By 3:30 in the afternoon, what was left of the main
party crested the crater and walked past steam vents to the summit. The volcano was
alive, they realized, by the strong smell of sulfur and the hissing from the openings
at the highest point of the Pacific Northwest. The Mazamas obtained their record,
putting fifty-nine people on the summit. At 4:30, Professor McClure set up his mercurial
barometer and took several measurements. Later, his figures were computed to an altitude
of 14,528 feet, which would make Rainier the tallest peak in the contiguous United
States. The altitude was off, as it turned out—too high by 117 feet.

Curtis did not allow the party to stay long on top. He knew the snow that had been
mush on the way up would quickly harden when the sun left it, and also that the way
down was the most dangerous part of any climb. The exhausted party followed Curtis.
Just after dusk, two climbers lost their footing and slid, falling quickly toward
a ledge. They caught themselves before tumbling over a cliff. Curtis went after the
frightened, scuffed men and led them back to the main group. Just before 10 p.m.,
all of the climbers collapsed at Camp Muir.

In the confident afterglow of their success, several Mazamas, including McClure, decided
to go all the way to Paradise, a drop of five thousand feet, instead of spending the
night at Camp Muir. Midway through that final descent, McClure hopped up on a rock
to take in a moonlit view; he knew instantly he had made a mistake. “Don’t come down
here,” he shouted. It was too late for him. He slipped, and was gone in a whoosh.
The other climbers said they barely heard a thing. McClure fell hundreds of feet,
bouncing over sharp rocks. Much later, when the Mazamas found his body, it was bloody,
broken and perforated with deep wounds from sharp stones.

The Oregon professor’s demise was the first recorded death on Mount Rainier, and it
was news across the country. The mountain had become a gentleman’s Everest for a certain
kind of American adventurer. In the consensus view of the fatality, as later detailed
in
Harper’s Weekly,
Curtis was not held accountable. He was praised as a brave soul who had not only
led a historic climb of men and women to the top, but rescued two people on the way
down. “Mr. Curtis proved the right man in the right place,” one account noted. “A
better selection could not have been made.” After the climb, the Mazamas made Curtis
an honorary member, joining John Muir and a few other notables. And they became appreciative
fans of his outdoor photography, which Curtis advertised in a small brochure, “Scenic
Washington.” (Sample offering: “A panoramic view of Rainier, framed, ready for hanging—$25.”)
Within a year, the club boasted, “We now have the finest collection of Rainier views
in existence.”

Back at Camp Muir, Curtis tried to explain the quirks of the volcano to the men from
the East he had rescued. The mountain has its own weather system, he said. In the
summer, the radiant glow of the sun off the snow is so intense it burns the skin even
inside the nostrils. In the winter, up to ninety feet of snow can fall in a single
season. At dusk, the pyramidal shadow of the peak stretches to the crest of the Cascades.
At the top of Rainier, well below the surface, is a lake—melted water from the heat
that pushes up the nearly three-mile-long throat of the mountain. And the Indians,
who had called the peak
Takhoma,
never climbed it beyond the snowfields above the timberline. Only a fool or a Boston
Man would try such a thing.

The climber most fascinated by Indians was a man who introduced himself as Bird Grinnell.
That Grinnell?
Yes, George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, editor of
Forest and Stream
and considered the world’s foremost expert on Plains Indians. He traced his ancestry
to the
Mayflower.
He knew George Armstrong Custer long before the yellow-haired officer became an impetuous
Indian fighter. He had grown up with people like Cornelius Vanderbilt—at one time
the richest man in America—as a guest at the family house in Manhattan. He counted
among his best friends an ambitious young politician, Theodore Roosevelt, just gearing
up that summer to run for governor of New York. Ten years earlier, Grinnell and Roosevelt
had founded the Boone and Crocket Club, devoted to preserving wildlife in order to
have the opportunity to shoot it later. Oh, and it was
Doctor
George Bird Grinnell, a Ph.D. from Yale, though Curtis could call him Bird. Please.

Another mustachioed man warming his hands at Camp Muir was Clint Merriam.
That Merriam?
Yes. C. Hart Merriam, cofounder of the National Geographic Society, a zoologist and
ornithologist by trade. He was the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. In that duty
he had conducted an inventory of the natural world in the United States, a sort of
Noah’s ark accounting of native plant and animal life before much of it disappeared.
Though he knew more about birds than perhaps anyone else in the country, Merriam’s
lasting contribution to the study of the land was his theory of “life zones,” used
to classify the bioregions of the United States. Merriam’s wild turkey, among other
species, was named for him. He was a doctor of medicine as well, though Curtis could
call him Clint.

As for Mr. Curtis? He had dropped out of school before his twelfth birthday and later
operated a picture studio in Seattle. His wife, now pregnant with their third child,
helped to run the shop, along with other family members. Curtis wasn’t going to fake
it. He could not fathom their academic argot. The names being tossed around—Roosevelt,
Pinchot, Vanderbilt—he recognized from the papers. He was nobody compared to them,
an itinerate preacher’s kid trying to make a name for himself in the city on the shores
of Puget Sound.

Much of that reputation-building was linked to gold from Alaska. The rush to the Last
Frontier had started a year earlier, bringing a stampede through Seattle and making
a fortune for merchants—from the outfitting, financing and fleecing of hapless sourdoughs.
Ever the opportunist, Curtis himself had taken advantage of the last great American
gold rush, dispatching his brother Asahel to the frozen fields of the Klondike. Curtis
followed him shortly thereafter. Back in Seattle, he dashed off a letter to
Century
Magazine,
a leading popular journal. “I have just returned from a trip over different trails
to the Alaskan gold fields, and have secured the most complete and the latest series
of photos,” he wrote. He had witnessed the raw side of the scramble—dead horses in
piles, flimsy tent villages, ramshackle towns. “In fact, these views depict every
phase of the mad rush to the gold fields and portray the situation and the difficulties
to be encountered more clearly and truthfully than can any mere pen picture.” It was
quite a claim: a young man with no experience in journalism boasting that he had captured
something that everyone else had missed in a big national story. But the gamble paid
off. The March 1898 issue of
Century
carried a gripping narrative and pictures—“The Rush to the Klondike.”

The article made a splash for Curtis, but the professional triumph was a personal
disaster on one level. His brother Asahel, who’d established the contacts in Alaska,
taken some of the pictures and hauled thousands of glass-plate negatives and developing
chemicals all through the Klondike in service of Curtis Inc., received no credit.
He was furious. He said Edward had no right taking his photographs—the product of
many frozen days in the wretched gold camps—and claiming them as his own. On the contrary,
Edward said, those pictures belonged to the Curtis studio; his brother was an employee.
After an explosive spat, Asahel quit. He took all his belongings from Edward’s home
and promised to go out on his own and compete with the other Curtis. From then on,
the brothers would not speak to each other. At chance encounters around town, they
turned away, as to a stranger.

After detailing his somewhat exaggerated Alaskan experience to Merriam and Grinnell,
Curtis told them he also knew a thing or two about Indians, though again, not from
books. He had learned by observation. His pictures of Indians around Puget Sound had
just been chosen for an exhibition sponsored by the National Photographic Society—the
most prestigious showing in the country. And a few weeks earlier, while leading another
Mazama expedition, to the top of Mount St. Helens, Curtis had come upon two Indians
drying bark in the woods. He stayed behind to chat with the men and photograph them.
This early Indian picture, owned by the Mazamas and almost never seen, is a startling
piece of photojournalism, showing natives deep in a forest at the base of a restless
mountain; they are wearing long pants and white men’s shirts, grimacing at the camera.

Grinnell and Merriam were intrigued by this lanky man who’d appeared out of the fog
on a glacier, all blue eyes and bounce in his step. Just before Curtis “thawed them
out and bedded them down,” as Curtis later conveyed to a friend, he mentioned a few
more details about the tribes of the maritime West. This business of the potlatch,
the Indian ritual of giving away worldly goods, was an extraordinary event. There
was nothing more honorable. And yet government agents were trying to ban the potlatch—they
considered it barbaric, unfit for a race that needs to join the lot of civilization.
Canada had made it a crime for Coast Salish people to participate in their most esteemed
ceremony. The two men leaned into their rescuer:
Tell us more.

A few days later, Curtis hosted the distinguished gentlemen at his studio, a showroom
of the finest faces in Seattle and the most gloried scenery in the region. But the
easterners were fascinated by his Indian pictures. A big part of his business now
came from selling “Curtis Indians,” as they were advertised in a brochure, and his
search for native people had taken him well beyond the city, east of the Cascades,
where he found a band of the Nez Perce living at the edge of the Columbia River on
wind-raked scablands. And farther east, into Montana, he’d gone for glimpses of buffalo-dependent
tribes. His Indians were a startling departure from the usual depictions of these
people. There were, in the faces, distinct human beings, not character types. How
did he do it?

Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours
of study. Though he’d gone many times to Rainier, much of the mountain had eluded
him as a subject. He said it could take years to get it right, years when he might
return from the glaciers empty-handed. You had to understand the essence of a thing
before you could ever hope to capture its true self. And yes, he was trying to bring
a painterly eye to the process, a subjective artistry. No reason to apologize. He
believed that no two people could point a camera at something and come away with the
same image. But, of course, photography involved a mechanical side as well, and there
too, you could shape the final product to match a vision—to bring the right image
to light from a stew of chemicals, to touch it up in a print shop, to finish with
an engraving pen. Curtis never turned it off, never took time to play or let his mind
roam, even at home. At night in the big Seattle house, “he studied pictures,” Clara’s
cousin William Phillips recalled, “the whys and wherefores; the ifs and the ands:
landscapes, portraits, marine views and studies from old masters. He reveled in such,
in his musings, in his thoughts and conceptions.”

Curtis often slept in his studio, working until first light. In the early morning,
when his wife arrived to open the shop for business, she would find him slumped against
a wall, fresh-printed pictures spread all over the floor, his clothes wrinkled, cigarette
stubs in a pile. And then he would snap to, rub his face and resume his work as if
he’d never taken a break. He boasted that he needed very little sleep to function
well; he had a prodigious amount of energy. His tank was always full.

“Wait till you see the next picture I make,” he would exclaim. “It’s going to be a
crackerjack!”

His labors would be rewarded with one of the biggest prizes in American photography.
The pictures prompted by Princess Angeline’s routine and repeat visits to the Tulalip
reservation—
The Clam Digger
and
The Mussel Gatherer,
along with
Homeward
—had made the finals. And
Homeward,
which showed Puget Sound Indians in a high-bowed canoe backlit by the sun-infused
clouds of early evening, won the grand prize: a gold medal from the National Photographic
Society. Soon, those pictures would tour the world.