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The climber: Curtis on Mount Rainier in 1897, from a booklet he published of mountaineering photos and adventures. (The picture is cropped.)
TEN THOUSAND VERTICAL feet above the confines of his studio in Seattle, Curtis positioned himself now on Mount Rainier at the magic hour of a midsummer day—a time when glaciers that had been blue would blush for a few minutes. He set up his camera on a platform overlooking two downward-thrusting fjords of ice, wrinkled with crevasses eighty feet deep or more. He was shooting in black and white with his 14-by-17, but even glass plates without the ability to hold color could mirror something that few eyes had seen, there in the alpenglow of the volcano.
For two years, Curtis had stalked Rainier in all its moods, catching the savagery of its storms, the exuberance of its wildflower burst, the listlessness of dead-zone fog that wrapped the mountain in spooky silence. In order to get close enough to understand Rainier, Curtis had to become a mountaineer. And in those two years of exploration, the sickly cripple of seven years earlier had become an accomplished climber. Curtis would find his way over ice and above the clouds, would crawl over crumbling lava rock and slow-tread along shaky snow bridges, making his own path. Intimacy—as with Princess Angeline—was what he sought with this subject.
The natives in canoes and the big mountain sixty miles southeast of Seattle struck him as the most authentic parts of a region rapidly remaking itself. In the city, forests and hills were leveled, rivers were pinched, and boulders that had been left from the last glacial epoch were dynamited. Ports were dredged ever deeper and fields gouged open for canals—all in a great hurry to form a new metropolis. In defiance of the setting, the people of Seattle intended to bring the city’s bedrock hills down to something closer to the streets of their hometowns of Cleveland and Chicago. Giant hoses sluiced away the tops of Denny and Jackson hills, the mud running downslope to fill in the tideland near Angeline’s old shack.
The younger Curtis, Asahel, was drawn to the urban creation, and spent his free time shooting industrial pictures, buildings rising, scrub brush turned to broad avenues. He was trying to establish a name outside the studio where he had worked for his brother since 1895. The boys shared a belief that their entrée into the larger world would be through a camera. While Asahel shot the mess of a city’s dawning, Ed Curtis was pulled to the bigger palette that started at Seattle’s edge. And if getting close to Rainier meant he had to warm himself in steam vents at the summit to keep from freezing, or duck into a snow cave that might smother him in a seismic shrug, he was game for it. The studio restrained him, even more so after he shed his partner in 1897 and went out on his own as “Edward S. Curtis, Photographer and Photoengraver.” In the city, he was the maestro with a trademark fishhook signature and a calendar full of appointments. In the high country, he was Curtis the climber, going places no photographer had gone.
In the fading light now he looked down across the Nisqually Glacier and saw what appeared to be a small party on this summer’s eve. The clouds swooshed in on an ocean-borne current. Camp Muir was often a reliable bench above the evening fog. But with a strong westerly wind, the clouds could be pushed upward, obscuring the white wilderness. A few minutes was all it took for what had been an uninterrupted view in all directions to disappear, visibility reduced to nothing. Curtis lost sight of the climbers below, though their voices remained.
“Hellooooooooo,” came a cry through a purgatory of gray. Curtis bellowed back. He sealed his camera and tucked it in his knapsack. Using his six-foot-long alpenstock, with a metallic pick at one end, he stabilized himself as he took small, quick steps downward toward the human sound.
“Over here!”
After some back and forth, silhouettes appeared in the soup, accompanied by much chattering and staccato grumbling. They were a half-dozen men, adrift and confounded on one of Rainier’s most treacherous glaciers, the Nisqually, an ice field nearly five miles long.
“We’re lost.” The climbers were middle-aged and well outfitted, and looked to be fit and robust for their age. They were shivering, mist collected on their mustaches, clothes soaked. Curtis knew that dusk could be disorienting and deadly at this altitude. Down below, the flower meadows were known as Wonderland, and a campsite was called Paradise. Up high, names were as hard as the eternal snow: Cadaver Gap and Disappointment Cleaver. Rainier was the most heavily glaciated peak in the then United States—thirty-five square miles of permanent snowfields and ice. One step was all it took for someone to fall into a slit of the Nisqually, the body never to be retrieved, part of the mountain’s buried memories.
In Curtis, the lost men had stumbled upon a climber known as much for his ascents on the high, unknown terra of the Pacific Northwest as for his leadership. They could not have been luckier.
“Follow me.”
He guided them slowly upward, making sure they stayed close together and took small steps, to his refuge at Camp Muir. He had hauled firewood over the previous days, and built a rock shelter where he could stoke a blaze and get out of the wind. He got the campfire going, and while sipping hot drinks the climbers revealed something about themselves. They were from the East, from New York and Washington, D.C. Men on a mission: studying the mountain for science, part of a campaign to give Rainier formal protection, which would happen the following year when it became the nation’s fifth national park. Yes, of course Curtis recognized their names, at least some of them. He had rescued two of the most famous people in America.
The year before, Curtis had made national news—but not with his camera. The Mazamas, one of the best organized of the climbing clubs sprouting in postfrontier America, had ventured north from their home in Portland, Oregon, in the third week of July to attempt a record: most people to summit Mount Rainier. The traveling group of two hundred included women, in keeping with the progressive bent of the club, and several scientists. Though the mountain had first been scaled twenty-eight years earlier, it remained somewhat of a mystery. How active was the volcano? How thick were the glaciers? What forms of life thrived in the year-round snow? Even the exact height was in dispute, a question the Mazamas hoped to resolve. Among their members was Professor Edgar McClure, a University of Oregon chemist who brought along a mercurial barometer he planned to deploy on the summit as a way to settle the question of Rainier’s precise elevation. “Never before has there been such an excursion,” the Portland Oregonian reported, and quoted a leader thusly as he informed those they met along the way: “We were the pick and flower of Portland; our boys were all fleet of foot and strong of limb and our girls were all young and handsome.”
The climbers arrived at Longmire, a base in the old-growth forest with hot springs for bathing. Then it was upward and onward, by foot to a meadow at Paradise camp. There, the climbers met a self-confident woman and her husband, an engaging, hyperkinetic man loaded down with camera equipment: “A certain Mr. E .S. Curtis of Seattle,” the Mazama journal noted. Clara, the mother of two young children, had no plans to aim for the summit, but she loved tramping around the high country with her husband. Curtis knew the mountain like his living room. He warned the climbers just before nightfall: should they awaken to a sound—“a deep, hoarse roar”—it would be an avalanche, off in the distance. Enjoy it, he said.
The expedition was a massive undertaking, involving four tons of gear, two beef steers, seven milk cows, assorted beasts of burden and a brass band. That first night in Paradise, Curtis was summoned to help with an emergency: a man from California, “not accustomed to the dangerous vagaries of mountain storms in the Northwest,” in the Mazamas’ official account, had gone missing. Curtis set off in the darkness without hesitation, his wife unfazed. “Never shall I forget the heroic example that Mrs. Curtis gave us of womanly courage when she bade her hushed goodbye as he started out into the fog, the gale, and the dangerous darkness of the mountain the first night in camp,” wrote Dr. Weldon Young, the team’s doctor. They found the frightened, shivering Californian on snow two miles from camp. This rescue, and Curtis’s expertise on the mountain, so impressed the Mazamas that they asked him to lead their expedition. Curtis agreed. He also welcomed all female climbers who wanted to make a go for the top, and named one young woman from Portland, Ella McBride, as a coleader. McBride was a schoolteacher, with great stamina and athleticism that Curtis admired. Per a Mazama request, Curtis gave in to one custom of the club: the ladies were required to wear bloomers.
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.
As impressed as the visitors were by Curtis the photographer and Curtis the mountaineer, they were equally interested in Curtis the amateur anthropologist. He had collected bits of mythology and tribal narratives along his picture-taking path, and wrote up summaries of these scraps of the Indians’ inner world. For decades Grinnell had fought to save the American bison, using his influential mouthpiece, Forest and Stream, to shame speculators of buffalo hides and skulls, the mindless poachers with rapid-fire rifles who had reduced a bounty of perhaps sixty million to a few hundred stragglers. Grinnell’s passion for lost causes was now focused on Plains Indians. The Pawnee, the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne—they’d been pushed to the brink, and their culture was being erased from the land of their grandparents. In Grinnell’s view, the way to understand Indians was to become more like them, rather than insist that the tribes become more like us. He had lived with Plains Indians for twenty seasons, could speak the language and many dialects, and had published Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales. The Blackfeet had made him an honorary member of the tribe. Grinnell feared that in just a few years’ time, these natives might end up like the buffalo.
To Grinnell and Merriam, departing from the Pacific Northwest after a fortuitous encounter on the region’s highest peak, this Curtis man seemed like quite the resourceful fellow. He knew Alaska, mountains and Indians. He was fast on his feet, quick with a joke, full of practical knowledge, physically heroic.
Over the winter, they stayed in touch. And in the spring of 1899 Merriam made a proposal to Curtis: how would he like to join the largest scientific exploration of Alaska ever undertaken? The idea came from the Gilded Age titan Edward Henry Harriman, who had just gained full control of the Union Pacific Railroad as part of a bigger scheme to monopolize rail traffic—much to the annoyance of his chief rival, J. P. Morgan. The deal-making had left Harriman, at the age of fifty-one, exhausted; his doctor recommended a long cruise. Harriman turned his hiatus into something much bigger. He strode into the Washington, D.C., office of C. Hart Merriam with a plan to stock a large ship with the finest zoologists, geologists, botanists and ethnologists and go forth in search of the unknown. Merriam would organize the scientific party. Harriman would pay for it all. It was to be the last great exploratory expedition of its kind in North America, dating to the Lewis and Clark journey a hundred years earlier. Curtis would be the official photographer.
The steamship George W. Elder left Seattle on the final day of May 1899, loaded down with milk cows and chickens, a well-stuffed library and a well-stocked bar, and 126 people, including two medical doctors, a chef and sous-chef, a chaplain, taxidermists, guides and the Harriman family. Curtis was the youngest and least credentialed member of the expedition, and he brought along an assistant, Duncan Inverarity, a friend from Seattle. Among those sailing north were the two best-known naturalists in America, John Muir and John Burroughs, both long-bearded and long-winded, called “the Two Johnnies.” Also on board was a lanky gentleman with faraway eyes whose name was constantly in the papers: Gifford Pinchot, a man of the woods, from a wealthy family. At night, the ship’s salon hosted arcane discussions by the scientists, speaking mostly in Latin, “fearfully and wonderfully learned,” as Burroughs put it. The German-born forester Bernhard Fernow played Beethoven on the grand piano. Pinchot went on at length about how the outdoors made him feel most alive. The Two Johnnies argued, a flutter of white beards and spokes of fingers poking each other’s chests. By day, the scientists would disembark in a particular bay, and then bring back all sorts of plants, fish and wildlife to the ship, where they were picked apart. The Elder steamed past the rainforest shores of southeast Alaska, up into Glacier Bay, through the inlets of Prince William Sound, out along the far edge of the Aleutian Islands, touching the Siberian shore—where Mrs. Harriman wanted to leave a footprint in Russia—and then back, a nine-thousand-mile round-trip. No junket, the expedition claimed to have discovered six hundred species new to science, putting some of the best minds of new-century America to good use.
For Curtis, the Elder was a floating university—an Ivy League one at that. From E. H. Harriman he learned how to operate an audio recording device, a wax cylinder that could pick up and preserve sound. It was an expensive, newfangled toy for the railroad tycoon and his seven-year-old son, Averell. Curtis realized the recorder could be used to preserve the songs and words of the people they observed along the way. Outside Sitka, the machine recorded a Tlingit chant. Curtis was closest to Grinnell, an easterner who acted more like a westerner and who conveyed a sense of urgency about the passing of so much that was original to the continent. Grinnell was a member of the expedition because of his knowledge of birds, but he seemed more interested in the native people they met. These villagers in animal skins and furs were ogled at by most of the scientists, treated like exotic species or fossilized relics. When the ship sailed into a bay where women were skinning seals, most of the Harriman elites were repulsed by the smell and carnage. Curtis waded ashore and spent a day talking to the natives and taking pictures. The photographs show people who seem annoyed, at best, by the intrusion of well-outfitted Anglos. There are no moonlit silhouettes, no soft-focus portraits. The photos have a hard, documentary edge.
The Curtis method was simple: get as close as he could. He worked the same way with the landscapes. In shooting nearly five thousand photographs for the expedition, he sometimes leapt from iceberg to iceberg, slipped on polished stones in freezing streams and hiked to the edge of crevasses. Once, in his canoe in Glacier Bay, he tried to get close to a heaving ice field that was calving big chunks. Crewmen on board the Elder watched in amusement as Curtis paddled toward an enormous, berg-shedding glacier. He took several glass-plate impressions, then moved in closer. And then—horror. A calf of ice nearly ten times the size of the steamship broke away with a thunderous crack and splash, sending a wall of waves toward Curtis’s tiny canoe. “About half a mile of the front fell at once,” Burroughs wrote. The photographer paddled directly into a wave, a suicide impulse, it seemed. But instead of being crushed and drowned, Curtis rode the high waters to their crests—to the amazement of those watching from the deck of the ship. He lost some plates and equipment, but returned alive, his sense of invincibility hardened.
The famous men assembled by the railroad tycoon liked the photographer. He was self-deprecating, brash, tireless, able to handle the repartee of big egos in tight quarters—and certainly obsequious without being annoying. He was also sincerely interested in learning from them. “His earnestness, industry, simplicity and innocence are positively contagious,” wrote William Phillips, in explaining the most attractive qualities of young Curtis.
Near the end of the Alaskan summer, the ship steered into what appeared to be an abandoned Tlingit village on Cape Fox—a ghostly place to the Harriman experts. But the empty village was alive in a way the experts could never know. The artwork, the totem poles and posts, the masks, the carved raven heads and salmon designs were animate objects to the Tlingit, each with a power of its own. The scientists took hundreds of artifacts from the village, to the disgust of John Muir, who felt his shipmates were no better than common looters. These distinguished scholars would never haul away paintings and statues from an empty church in Europe. The men were preserving culture, they insisted, not robbing a village. Plundering a native community was justified as a rescue for the sake of science; the artifacts were bound for museums in the United States.
To Grinnell, who’d been brooding for much of the trip, the majestic but strangely empty site on Cape Fox only confirmed what he’d been saying about the inhabitants of the big land: their way of life was passing. Every collision between the native world and modernity was a hopeless mismatch. The Indians were doomed. And here was all the evidence he needed: a dead village, like a body still warm to the touch. He confided these concerns to Curtis, who said he also was appalled that educated and celebrated men would steal so many priceless objects. Next year, Grinnell said, he planned to return to a place that curious outsiders had yet to pick apart, to take in a native ceremony on the high plains of Montana, and to do so in a respectful manner. For centuries, the people who lived where mountain and prairie came together had gathered during the longest days of the year to praise the sun. Missionaries and the government’s Indian agents were closing in. The Indians’ central ritual would soon be gone, outlawed like the potlatch. Grinnell was privileged to witness the ceremony because of his standing among the Blackfeet. He planted an idea with Curtis: why not see for yourself and get it down for posterity? On the deck of the ship as it steamed back to Seattle, Grinnell made an offer that would set the course for the rest of Curtis’s life. “Come with me next year,” he said. “You’ll have a chance to know Indians.”
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