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Theodore Roosevelt, 1904. Curtis was invited to the president’s family estate at Sagamore Hill to take pictures of the children. He talked Roosevelt into a sitting as well, and both men loved the resulting portrait.
THE VIEW FROM the study of the Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill looked out on a sheltered slice of Long Island Sound, and it was quieter there on the second floor, though stuffy when the wind was down and the air heavy with summer heat. Edward Curtis and Teddy Roosevelt were talking about the West, a favorite subject of this polymath president. It was not easy to carry on a prolonged conversation without some interruption from the younger residents. This was as the family wanted it—the house had few boundaries for age or class. Children were to be seen and to be heard. Adults were to play, when they weren’t giving the president some insight into a pressing global issue. Pets had free range of most rooms, and for a visitor a door could open to the surprise of something four-legged or feathered. At the dinner table each child was required to ask at least one question of a guest. In Curtis, the westerner who had spent the past seven years in places that Roosevelt considered as iconic to the young nation as cathedrals were to old Europe, the children had a source of stories about faraway people who could not seem more exotic to students of a New England private school. What were the Apache like? Why does a Sioux warrior eat the heart of a grizzly bear? How does a Hopi priest handle all those rattlesnakes? Are most Indians polygamous? What were Chief Joseph’s last words?
Curtis had many questions of his own. He had learned why a Piegan man would spend three days fasting before praying to the sun, but he knew very little about which fork a gentleman was supposed to use for salad at a formal dinner. The East Coast took some getting used to. Not just the humidity, which made a resident of the Pacific Northwest sweat through a shirt before breakfast, but the customs and cultures. He would have to find his way without a translator—more difficult, in some respects, than trying to crack the puzzle of the Apaches’ eternal secrets. How did one dress for lunch? Was it proper to swim with a woman, alone? Could he feign interest in the Harvard debating club? He was lucky to have the Roosevelt family of eight—Edith, Teddy and their six children—as his guides to the affairs of Long Island. For the only rule of the summer White House that Roosevelt cared for was that guests not be slothful or boring. The youngest president in the nation’s history and the thirty-six-year-old photographer had much in common. Curtis was one of the few guests who knew, firsthand, all about those wondrous scraps of original America beyond the 100th meridian that Roosevelt was so passionate about, places he felt were in peril at this moment in the country’s aggressive adolescence. They took to each other in no time.
“I had found a listener who not only gave his undivided attention to my expression of thoughts and desire,” said Curtis, “but he concurred as well in my beliefs.” Curtis lit up as Roosevelt told of his ranching days in the Dakotas, a refuge for a grief-stricken young man who had lost his wife and mother on the same day. He beamed when Roosevelt talked about riding an Appaloosa at dusk in Montana, or his more recent journey to the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt guided him through the rooms of the three-story, seven-bedroom Queen Anne–style house just outside Oyster Bay. The library was decorated with bearskin rugs on the floor and trophy antelope on the walls. “I soon learned of his special gift,” Curtis said. Roosevelt “could read a page of a book at a glance, not a line at a time like most of us mortals.”
The dining room was informal for such a big house, seating twelve at best; heads of bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain elk stared glassy-eyed under a beamed ceiling. The table, Roosevelt explained, had come from Florence, bought while Edith and Teddy were honeymooning in Italy. Had Curtis ever been abroad? No, sir. Curtis discussed Indians, and on this subject he could always hold a room. But did he know that the Roosevelt compound was on land named for Sagamore Mohannis, the Indian chief who had used it as a meeting ground in the 1660s? That would not surprise Curtis: every corner of the country had a native name that predated the new one. Two of the nation’s biggest cities—Chicago, from an Algonquin word for “garlic field,” and Manhattan, from another Algonquin term, “isolated thing in the water”—had Indian origins.
The year had been especially busy for the twenty-sixth president, who took office after an assassin killed William McKinley in 1901. At home, Roosevelt fought the major trusts, making enemies of the richest men in the country. And when the Supreme Court ruled in 1904 that the president had the constitutional right to break up concentrations of great wealth that restricted competition, Roosevelt anticipated that J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman (the Alaska expedition sponsor) would use their power to deprive him of a second term. Abroad, Russia and Japan were in violent conflict over disputed territory; Roosevelt the warrior had been called upon to act as a peace broker. He was also guiding a treaty through Congress that would give the United States control of the Panama Canal Zone, a right-of-way to dig a fifty-mile-long ditch through a malarial isthmus. He had introduced a term into everyday public life—conservation—and was trying to get fellow Americans to see that the continent they now straddled was a fragile one, losing much of its physical character in the clamorous tumble into the new century. Though he was considered the most popular man in the country, Roosevelt had yet to face the voters. He was up for a full four-year term in mere months. But just now he had other concerns. Could Mr. Curtis do the family a favor? Yes, Mr. President—anything. Curtis had made a blue-cheese salad dressing earlier, and Mrs. Roosevelt loved it. She was, Teddy said in a characteristic word, deeelighted! Could he share the secret of the recipe? For lunch.
Earlier that year, Ladies’ Home Journal had named the winners of its Prettiest Children in America contest; the picture that Clara Curtis had submitted of a Seattle girl was one of the chosen few, selected from eighteen thousand entries. And just as the rescue of two distinguished easterners on Mount Rainier had opened a much bigger world to Curtis, this contest proved again that he had a knack for fortuitous serendipity. Walter Russell, who was to paint the prettiest children, had been fascinated by the Curtis portrait of the little girl; he had passed on the name of the Seattle photographer to the president. And so in June of that year, as Curtis was packing for another long season in Indian country, came an invitation to visit Oyster Bay, to photograph the Roosevelt children.
He traveled the length of the country, four full days by train, and then took a short boat ride from New York City to Long Island. In barely a decade’s time, Curtis had gone from a homesteader’s shack on Puget Sound to the summer White House on Long Island Sound. He and Roosevelt had friends in common: Gifford Pinchot, for one, whom the photographer had met on the Harriman expedition and kept in touch with. A patrician bachelor with a self-righteous streak, Pinchot was a top domestic adviser to the president and the nation’s chief forester. Bird Grinnell was a longtime hunting buddy of the president’s. The naturalist John Burroughs—one of the Two Johnnies on the Alaska trip—was so close to Teddy that the president would dedicate his next book to him. Good men all around, they agreed.
Curtis was instructed that his only duty, at first, was to get to know the children: to play with them, to make fires with them, to race with them, to dig clams with them, to tell them stories of the West. They were a kinetic bunch, riding horses around the grounds, whooping and hollering up the stairs, playing hide-and-seek around the orchard, the barn, the icehouse, the windmill, the pet cemetery. They buried each other—and the dog—in beach sand up to their chins, and the kids rode camelback-style on Curtis’s shoulders. The biggest child, Teddy Roosevelt himself, was a believer in vigorous exercise. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,” he said, but “the doctrine of the strenuous life.” But that didn’t mean he couldn’t make it a game. At Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt Obstacle Walk was led by the president, followed by Curtis and the children. It left everyone breathless on the veranda at sunset.
“I found them the most energetic, vital family,” said Curtis. “They made me feel at home, in fact like one of the family.” During the day, he foraged along the shore with Quentin, who was six years old, or rode ponies with Archibald, who was ten. The teenagers, Theodore Junior and Kermit, spent much of the time with cousins and people their age. And now and then twenty-year-old Alice would drop by. “Princess Alice,” her family nickname, was a heartthrob for men of many ages, a high-spirited beauty. “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice,” said Roosevelt. “I cannot possibly do both.”
As thrilled as Curtis was to be allowed into the inner circle of the first family, and to be chosen to take pictures of the president’s children, he had something else he wished to accomplish. In 1903, the studio had hired Adolph Muhr, a midwesterner well known for his own Indian pictures and a brilliant technician. It was a coup for Edward and Clara to bring Muhr into the fold, for he was the talent behind many of the Indian photographs of Frank Rinehart, an artist and photographer of some renown. Once in Seattle, Muhr would never leave the Curtis dynamo. His influence on Curtis was immediate and lasting. It was his finishing hand that made so many of the Curtis portraits of the past year memorable. Muhr was the first step in hiring a crew that could construct the Curtis blueprint. Young Bill Phillips, Clara’s cousin, was already on the payroll, a full-time assistant. Soon, Curtis planned to add a field researcher, someone trained in ethnology, and a writer, someone who had practiced deadline journalism. He also needed an editor for the finished product, though he was still not sure exactly what form that would take—a book, several books, a permanent exhibition. He needed translators, dozens of them, in every part of the West. All of this would cost money that Curtis did not have. No matter how well his portrait business hummed along and how many individual Indian pictures he sold, the revenue could not begin to support the ever-growing undertaking. The Big Idea might sink him.
Looking for a benefactor, he had gone east for the first time in 1903, for an audience with experts at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. In recent years, they had launched several research projects into Indian country and were gathering all manner of cultural artifacts for permanent storage in the capital. But in 1903 the Smithsonian came under fire in Congress for spending federal dollars on patronage hacks and glorified junkets. When Curtis arrived for a meeting that included William Henry Holmes, chief of the Bureau of Ethnology, they were in retreat. Curtis had been courting the Smithsonian for months with letters hinting at his grand scheme. And just what made a dropout from a one-room schoolhouse think he could get the nation’s top ethnologists to back his project? Balls. Those who didn’t try for the highest peak were doomed to the foothills. In that sense, Curtis had something else in common with Roosevelt, whose most famous words were an encouragement to take risks: “to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
Inside the red sandstone walls of the Smithsonian Castle, Curtis gave an exhaustive presentation to some of the nation’s leading authorities on American Indians. His way inside had been greased by favorable words from Grinnell and Merriam. Curtis planned to document eighty tribes, he explained: all the people in North America still living somewhat of a “primitive existence.” Eighty tribes? The figure made jaws drop; it amounted to one of the largest anthropological projects ever undertaken in the United States. He would make audio recordings of songs and languages so the words would never be lost, even if the tribes disappeared. He would write down their music so people could play it later. And finally, he planned to use a heavy, stand-up device that a few photographers were just starting to tinker with: a moving-picture camera. Moving pictures? The Great Train Robbery, the first narrative film, had recently been released. So lifelike. Curtis explained that he would use this camera to film the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo. This last task struck the learned men at the Smithsonian as preposterous. Well-trained doctors of science had been trying for years to get close enough to the Navajo to obtain pictures and interpretations of the Yeibichai Dance. It was impossible. In closing, Curtis insisted that for all the other work he intended to do, in the main his great undertaking would be a picture record—using only the finest and costliest finishing process—of the daily lives of the first Americans. And, of course, it was art as well, a subjective look, by the very nature of how and where he pointed the camera.
Though Curtis had impressed Frederick Webb Hodge, the top official of Indian affairs at the Bureau of Ethnology and the editor of American Anthropologist, the other authorities at the Smithsonian were unmoved. They rejected him outright. He would get nothing from the nation’s foremost storehouse of its history and artifacts. They doubted that Curtis could ever pull off such an immense project, and they were wholly unimpressed with his credentials. For God’s sake, he’s uneducated! Curtis was clearly indignant at the setback, and it hurt.
More humiliation was to come. During the same trip, he went to New York in search of a book backer. Surely he would have no problem finding a major publisher. In Manhattan, Curtis outlined his plan to Walter Page at Doubleday. The editor gave Curtis a respectful listen. But Page was troubled, he told the upstart from Seattle, by how many Indian products were already on the market—books, portfolios, cards.
“Couldn’t give ’em away,” said Page.
That is, unless Curtis wanted to do something along the lines of Karl May’s depictions of that hardy perennial, the Noble Savage. May was a German author who sold millions of books about Indians well before he ever saw one, or set foot in America. No, no, no—Curtis wanted realism, albeit with a humane touch, and he insisted that his published works be produced in a costly finishing and printing process. If that was the case, Page informed him, this collection would have to sell for a much higher price than normal picture books. How much higher? A typical hardback might cost $1.50. The multivolume Curtis books would have to fetch several hundred dollars, maybe $1,000 or more, just to break even. A thousand dollars: that’s what the average American earned in a year. Only the very rich, and the largest cultural institutions and universities, could afford them. And even that high-end market might not be enough to support the publication. But see here, Curtis countered, his Indian pictures were unique—look at them! These portraits were not dime-store savages or cartoon maidens or Karl May fantasies. He intended to make publishing history. Sorry, Page said, there’s just no audience for fine Indian pictures. With the rejections, Curtis could not build his team beyond Phillips and Muhr. Until he could find a deep funding source, all other hiring was on hold.
At Sagamore Hill, Curtis was unsure how the president would feel about his fascination with Indians. In his early writing, Roosevelt had been none too sympathetic. He called them “filthy” and “lecherous” and “faithless” in his volume of western history published in 1896. What he had seen of Indians during his ranching days, tribes decimated by disease and war, “were but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.” A decade earlier, he had been even more cruelly glib. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” In almost every respect—personal hygiene, sexual relations, the worship of multiple spirits, the tribal approach to battle, preferring to ambush and raid instead of lining up in formation for a formal fight—the Indian way was appalling to the settled customs and manners that had produced the Roosevelts of New York City. But later, as a warrior colonel, with Indians among his Rough Riders who charged up San Juan Hill in 1898, Roosevelt for the first time saw natives who were heroic. He was moved by how fearless they were, riding into a blizzard of enemy fire on behalf of the American flag. As president, his views continued to evolve. Like everything else on American soil, Indians were in his care now, a tenuous trust relationship.
Still, Roosevelt was not a likely ally for Curtis. The photographer faced a tough dilemma: could a man whose dream was to humanize Indians persuade a man who was so dismissive of them to back his work? The question roiled Curtis while spending long days and intellectually stimulating evenings with the Roosevelts and their circle. Should he dare to ask the president to intervene? Was there something he could do to get the Smithsonian experts to change their minds? Or could he set Curtis up with one of his friends, a patron with deep pockets?
But first he had to humanize the first family. He shot pictures of the boys in a variety of settings: outside, in the library, at play, in serious thought. Quentin, the youngest son, looks pleading in his close-up, no easy smile, his eyes holding his emotion. After finishing with the children, Curtis persuaded the president to pose for him—a formal portrait. In it, Roosevelt is seen from the chest up, in dark suit, knotted tie, gray-speckled mustache, his pince-nez in front of his eyes as usual. But two things stand out: the light, showing one half of Roosevelt’s face as if it were a waning moon, and the jawbone, which is stern but not forced or clenched in fighter mode. Those ferocious teeth, a favorite of cartoonists, are hidden behind a closed mouth. The president looks bookish, studious, pensive. Curtis loved the effect, and believed he had captured a Roosevelt seldom seen. When he developed the picture, he used a process reserved for less than one percent of his pictures: orotone. “The ordinary photographic print lacks depth and transparency,” said Curtis in one of his brochures explaining the technique. But with orotone, even dull stones “are as full of life and sparkle as an opal.” The image is printed directly onto glass and then backed with gold spray: a difficult and very expensive way to finish a photograph in 1904.
“My picture of the President is great,” Curtis wrote Gifford Pinchot. “It is quite different from anything before taken and, I believe, will be considered by all who know him, a splendid likeness. I made no effort to re-touch up the face and make him a smooth-visaged individual without a line or anything to show character.” Well! Pinchot could have popped a vest button at the brazen, breathless self-regard coming from the man the Indians called the Shadow Catcher, a name he had been given in Arizona. But it wasn’t just self-praise. The social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis, a Roosevelt intimate, was equally impressed after he saw the print. “It is more than a picture,” he said. “It is the man himself.”
At the end of his stay with the family, Curtis opened his Indian portfolio to the president. He showed him the handsome Hopi men from Walpi, the giggly-faced Hopi women with their hair in those tight flower whorls, the Blackfeet praying in the high-plains heat. In the past few years, Roosevelt himself had traveled throughout the Southwest, seeing much of it for the first time. The Hopi and Navajo dwellings in the Curtis pictures—strong, well-built homes holding to cliffs—were anything but the dingy, transient tents and lean-tos of Roosevelt’s earlier view. As part of his expanding knowledge of the country he governed, Roosevelt was starting to see the legacy of indigenous human life in the same way he saw the natural world—something that would be lost if present trends continued.
The living Indian communities were another story. Roosevelt was influenced by those who believed that tribal ties should be loosened, and natives eventually given full U.S. citizenship—assimilated, like recent European immigrants. The portrait of Chief Joseph, who had also posed with his mouth closed, eyes intense, caught the president’s attention. After hearing Curtis out, Roosevelt said the project was a bully idea, and a noble one, important to America’s lasting sense of self. Without being specific, he made a promise to Curtis in written form:
“No man could be doing anything more important,” he wrote. “I will support you in any way I can.”
In July of 1904, Curtis spent a frenzied few days with the joys of his home life: ten-year-old Hal, eight-year-old Beth and six-year-old Florence. The children hardly knew their father during the first years of the Indian project, Florence said later, but when he was around, the house was full of radiant sunlight. Stories, games, questions, tricks all flowed from the towering and peripatetic man. He renewed his vow to take the family—why not all of them?—on a long trip to Indian country. Soon. Appointments, requests and unanswered letters were stacked all over the house. They would have to wait.
He checked in with Muhr, running the technical side of the studio, fine-finishing the negatives Curtis brought home from the tribes. Muhr had never worked harder. “His example is so contagious,” Muhr said of his boss, “that everyone connected with him seems fired by the same enthusiasm and imbued with the same energy and ambition.” That contagion had spread to Ella McBride, the mountaineer Curtis had met on Rainier a few years earlier. Curtis had talked her into leaving her teaching job in Portland and moving to Seattle, where she became indispensable behind the camera at the studio. She also lived in the Curtis home, and was like a second mother, the girls said later.
Out the door Curtis went again. For the rest of the summer and into the fall Curtis worked at breakneck speed, bouncing all over the Southwest with a small entourage, usually including a few translators, and Phillips. In New Mexico Territory, west of Albuquerque, he arrived at what was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, nine hundred years. Descendants of the Anasazi, the people had built a community on a mesa seven thousand feet above sea level and named their fortress Acoma, a word that means “the place that always was.” Curtis found Acoma in the high-desert air just as he had found Supai in a basement next to the Colorado River—a cluster of people living in a remarkable redoubt, forgotten by the rest of the world. After dealing with Europeans of one sort or another for three hundred years, Acomans were cautiously accommodating.
Curtis was taken to the top, where women drew their water from a deep well and balanced the painted earthen jars on their heads. He climbed ladders to houses of sun-blasted rock. He was shown the cliffs where the natives had rolled giant boulders down on enemies—white, red and brown. They worshiped Jesus and the sun at Acoma, in equal measure, “a positive argument that a people can be loyal followers of two religious creeds at one and the same time,” Curtis wrote in Scribner’s, which published several large spreads of Curtis’s photojournalism. Their prize possession was a silver-crowned cane given them by Abraham Lincoln as a reward for loyalty to the Union. Curtis heard of the three-day battle with Don Juan de Oñate’s conquistadors in 1598, the worst blow in the history of Acoma. The Spanish burned homes, raided food supplies, threw men from the cliff and marched the surviving stragglers off to a makeshift prison in the valley. There, Oñate pronounced them guilty of violating the Act of Obedience and Homage, though most had never taken the oath Spain had forced on the natives. For punishment, every man over the age of twenty-five was to have one foot cut off; those younger were sentenced to slavery. Nearly two centuries passed before the Sky City of Acoma regained its preinvasion population. But people never entirely deserted the rock. They had been written off, like Indians in general; in obscurity, they eventually thrived.
Over several days, Curtis hiked up and down the winding, narrow passage to the summit village, a footpath of rock polished by wear over ten centuries. He shot At the Old Well of Acoma, one of his most Edenic still lifes, showing two veiled young women gathering water with their intricately painted vases. Calm pools of water always brought out the painterly side of Curtis. Near the base of the mesa looking up, he did a different kind of day-in-the-life, called The Old Roadway of Acoma. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, another artist who found renewal in New Mexico, Curtis loved the light in the Land of Enchantment.
Back in Arizona, Curtis went to see his friends in the Hopi Nation, and predictably, the high priest Sikyaletstiwa again rejected his request for entry in the Snake Society. For The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath, this was the third visit to the Hopi. He could watch. He could shoot pictures. And, in a step closer, this time he was invited to climb down into a kiva where priests tamed rattlesnakes in advance of the ceremony. But he could not join the men who performed the ritual.
The Hopi were amused by the latest device to emerge from the worn wagon Curtis had hauled to the high desert: a moving-picture machine. He set up the camera on the roof of a house and captured the choreography of the last days of the Snake Dance. It had been twenty-five years since young Ed Curtis canoed the waterways of Minnesota with his father, the colicky preacher spouting evangelical Christianity, a faith that never caught on with the boy. In the Hopi church of the outdoors, though, Curtis felt something stir in his soul. “Hopi have become a spiritual crossroads in my work, a still place in the middle of the continent,” he said. “These events are beyond words.”
His best work that year was with the Navajo, as he roamed over their 14,000-square-mile reservation under the sandstone spires of northeast Arizona. Like many who spent time with the Diné, Curtis was impressed by their silver and turquoise jewelry, their weaving and their colorful sand paintings. “As the chief human touch of the great southwestern desert, the Navajo are the artist’s joy,” Curtis wrote. He learned, by watching and through translators, that most Navajo families lived in three homes: a summer residence with a big garden; a stone house in a cliff above a wash, where freshets of water were captured for irrigation; and a hogan, usually built of clay, rock, mud and reeds, rounded at the edges. Polygamy was common, but women had superior property rights, owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute—a powerful incentive to stay married.
Threats to these domestic patterns came from federal agents, who were trying to dismantle Diné culture in the name of promoting civilization, and from Catholic missionaries, who were up to the same thing, though using a spiritual carrot instead of a government stick. Defying the doubts of the Smithsonian authorities, Curtis learned enough about the Yeibichai Dance to write up an explanation in his notebook, detailing what happened on each of the ritual’s nine days. If only, Curtis mused at one point, the average visitor could experience the sensation he felt after the sun went down in the Navajo Nation: “There he is in touch with the stillness of the night under the starry sky and sees before him, in this little spot lighted out of the limitless desert, this strange ceremony of supplication and thanksgiving.”
The highlight was Canyon de Chelly. Like Acoma, this stone-walled cavity had known human habitation for at least ten centuries. Though the valley floor was nearly six thousand feet above sea level, the weather was moderate enough year-round to make the canyon the garden spot of Navajo land, where rock, sun, wind, water and the ages had produced one of the world’s singular places. A haunt of history hung over the cinnamon-colored gash in the earth—those Anasazi, who had left so mysteriously in the mid-1300s, their well-kept stone houses intact, and those charred stumps of the once magnificent peach orchards that Kit Carson had burned to the ground when he starved the Navajo into submission in 1864. Just as he had seen the hunched figure of old Princess Angeline as an emblematic native of the land, Curtis saw the Navajo in sync with Canyon de Chelly. On horseback, they were dwarfed by cliffs rising a thousand feet above them and by a limitless empty sky. Being there, he understood why no one had bothered the Navajo for so long. The canyon was impossible to see from afar; it revealed itself only when you were actually upon it.
Curtis titled one picture Sunset in Navajo Land, another Cañon de Chelly. But a single long-view photogravure defined the entire Curtis enterprise: Vanishing Race. Seven Indians, perhaps of the same family, are on horseback, trailed by a dog, moving across the canyon floor, no faces visible, a bare human and animal presence against the monolithic rising walls. They appear tentative, on their way out, while the rock is forever and immutable. The title served his theme, but was dishonest to the Diné. No tribe in America, save perhaps the Sioux, had more people at the time, and no tribe had a bigger land base for a reservation. Their isolation had been their salvation; for centuries, no one else coveted the prickly ground they inhabited. And yet Curtis feared for their future as much as he worried about the dwindling cadre of Havasupai living near the Grand Canyon.
He shot more than six hundred photographs on that excursion. “My late trip to the southwest has been a successful one,” Curtis wrote his friend Professor Meany, the only man in Seattle who could appreciate the enormity of Curtis’s task. “In no former trip have I accomplished so much in so short a time.” He dashed off a letter to Gifford Pinchot, mindful of the possibility that the president’s confidant would pass the words on to his boss in the White House. “One of the hardest trips that I have ever made,” he wrote the forester, “met with more trouble from rains, accidents, that sort of thing than I have in my work heretofore, but withal, succeeded in getting a very large amount of splendid new material.” At home, he was given the kind of press adulation reserved for expeditions to the North Pole.
A SEATTLE MAN’S TRIUMPH
Curtis’s ally and publisher Alden Blethen continued to be supportive, ordering up multiple-page treatment for the photographer’s work, with six-column headlines such as the one above. The local kid had shown those eastern elites. “And he went to Arizona, and he stayed just long enough to accomplish that which Uncle Sam, with all his power and authority, had tried for two decades to do and failed,” Blethen’s Seattle Times reported. Three times in 1904, the paper devoted full-page features to Curtis, displaying his Canyon de Chelly pictures, referring to him in one headline as “Explorer, Clubman, Photographer, Historian and President’s Friend.”
Of course, Curtis couldn’t help rubbing it in with the men of the Smithsonian, though he tried to be diplomatic. He still hoped to win their backing, after all. “The longer I work at this collection of pictures the more I feel of their great value,” he wrote in late October to Frederick Webb Hodge, the most sympathetic of the Smithsonian’s Indian experts. Hodge himself had been to many of the places in the Southwest that had stoked Curtis’s passion. A year earlier, when the photographer had begun a correspondence with Hodge, he tried to get him to see the inevitability of the Curtis design. “In the beginning, I had no thought of making the series large enough to be of any value in the future, but the thing has grown so that I now see its great possibilities, and certainly nothing could be of much greater value. The only question now in my mind is, will I be able to keep the thing long enough and steady work, as doing it in a thorough way is enormously expensive.”
There was the nightmare—a sleep-destroying one at that. Curtis would soon be broke. He had spent thousands of dollars of his own money, depleting what savings he had and taking everything he could from the studio to finance four years with the Indians, dating to the Blackfeet summer with Grinnell. What was coming out now as finished photogravures could not begin to cover his costs. Meekly at first, and then more aggressively as his situation worsened, he lobbied Meany to arrange a loan from his wealthy Seattle friends, something to get him through another year or two of fieldwork. How much did he need? Curtis equivocated, then arrived at $20,000. Such a figure. But Meany went to work around town, capitalizing on the good press.
Clara was getting frantic. She did the books, and knew more than her husband that they were headed for disaster. The months apart had nearly made them strangers to each other. They now fought over Edward’s absences, over the direction of his work, over child-rearing decisions and schools, and all the social events she had to reject while her husband was feted by presidents and scholars. But mostly they fought over money. It was his load to bear and hers to live. The partner who’d followed her love across the sound at age seventeen, who’d spent many moonlit nights in alpine camps with him, was losing her husband to something bigger than both of them.
Curtis had to find a benefactor soon, or the entire enterprise would fold just as it was entering its most productive period. He wrote Merriam, Pinchot and Bird Grinnell, his powerful allies in Washington. He wrote the National Geographic Society, the Washington Academy of Science and the mogul who had given Curtis his first big break: railroad titan E. H. Harriman. All were sympathetic, supportive and full of praise, some of it over the top. Yes, they agreed, he was on to something masterful—keep at it! None put up a dime.
Teddy Roosevelt was his last best hope. Curtis sent recent Indian pictures to the president in December of 1904. A landslide election in November had kept T.R. in the White House; he won 34 of 45 states over a hapless Democrat and a Prohibition Party candidate with the unfortunate name of Silas Swallow. Two days after Christmas, Curtis got a letter from the president—labeled “personal”—thanking him for the pictures and praising the work, particularly one Navajo portrait. “Mrs. Roosevelt was as delighted as I was with that remarkable Indian picture,” Teddy wrote. “My dear sir, how are you able to do such work!”
How, indeed. Curtis was the toast of those who looked upon photography as an art form, not an easy crowd to please, prone to mumbled pretentions and caustic insecurities. This circle followed Alfred Stieglitz, the alpha male of sophisticated photography, who had lavished praise on the Shadow Catcher. And Curtis was held in equally high regard by those who saw in the emerging field of photojournalism an incalculable archival tool. Like Curtis, the great portrait photographer of an earlier era, Mathew Brady, had abandoned a prosperous private business framing faces of the famous in order to document an American chapter, in his case the Civil War. Photography, Brady said, could be “a great truthful medium of history,” but also like Curtis, he posed his warriors in positions that suited his views. Curtis was old-fashioned in one sense, sticking with cumbrous, fragile, heavyweight and dangerous glass-plate negatives when easier ways to take a picture were available. But in other photographic realms he embraced cutting-edge technology well ahead of his contemporaries. That same December of 1904 Curtis rented out a large hall in Seattle and mesmerized the audience with hand-colored lantern slides and moving pictures of Indians of the Southwest. The film prompted members of the audience to jump from their seats in fear. The Portland Oregonian raved about the “New and Remarkable ‘Motion Pictures’ of Snake Dance and Other Mystic Ceremonies.”
Alas, though Roosevelt could move trainloads of dirt and make water travel uphill by building a canal in a pinch of Panama land that had bankrupted the French, the imperious and strong-willed leader of the Western Hemisphere could not find someone with enough money to keep the Curtis Indian project alive. What he did for Curtis in the last days of 1904 was to connect the photographer with Francis Leupp, his commissioner of Indian affairs. Leupp could give Curtis a pass to photograph many of the rituals that Leupp’s Indian agents were trying to shut down. Curtis charmed him, and in short order they were close. In the new year of 1905, Leupp invited Curtis to Washington for Teddy’s inauguration in March. Many prominent American Indians—Geronimo of the Apache among them—had been asked to lead a parade past the Capitol on the day Roosevelt was sworn in.
Curtis rose from a short, sleepless night to greet the cold air of March 4, 1905, Inauguration Day, in Washington, D.C. He was staying at the Cosmos Club, once the Dolley Madison House, which had a reciprocal relationship with his own Rainier Club in Seattle; he had done a show of his colored lantern slides for members earlier in the week. He was barely into his second cup of coffee when a well-dressed older man from the club approached him with a request.
“Mr. Curtis,” he said, “I would like to see an Indian and talk to him.”
That so, Curtis mumbled. What else was new? It was the kind of request he got all the time, but especially in the East, where he was often treated like a travel agent with a limited number of visas to the Indian world. Curtis asked the man his business. He was a scholar—of Indian studies. But like Karl May, that popular novelist of Indian stories, this expert had never made eye contact with his subjects.
“I have written about the Indian for scientific magazines all my life and I have never seen one. I would like to learn about their life and logic.”
Curtis stormed outside. Here he had spent more time with native people than any of these so-called experts from the capital and he could not find a single financial backer. Yet this man—he made his living writing about Indians and had never seen one. He rushed off to the White House, where he had an appointment to photograph six tribal leaders. Snow patches covered the lawn, and Curtis shivered as he set up his tripod in an icy drizzle. The Indians who assembled on horseback wore feathered headdresses, some trailing down to their ankles, and were not in much of a mood for prolonged posing. The man in the middle, wrapped in a plain red army blanket, looked the most puckered and least amused: Geronimo. Curtis had met the leader of the Chiricahua Apache a few days earlier, at the Indian commissioner’s invitation. Geronimo was seventy-five, and the fire had yet to leave his eyes. “The spirit of the Apache is not broken,” Curtis wrote after spending time with him.
Born near the Gila River headwaters in New Mexico, Geronimo became a warrior after his wife, three small children and mother were slaughtered by Mexican soldiers in 1858. He would fight Anglos and Latinos of various uniforms for the next twenty-eight years, and take many wives. Among the Apache, though he was never a chief, he had mythic standing: it was said he could walk without leaving tracks, and defy bullets, injury and capture. He could make himself invisible. Near the end of his resistance, chased by five thousand troops—one fourth of the standing army—his followers numbered no more than thirty-six, for the raiding, nomadic Apache had many enemies, including other bands of the same tribe. His surrender in 1886 marked the formal end of organized military resistance by Indians to their conquerors.
After being captured, Geronimo was incarcerated at camps in Florida and Alabama. In old age, relocated to the compound of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo became a celebrity of the new century, the last of the “wild Indians,” now professing to embrace the pickled tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. Though in the slow-motion harmlessness of his old age, Geronimo needed government approval to leave the fort; he remained a prisoner of war for the rest of his days. President Roosevelt gave him permission to tell his life story to a writer, S. M. Barrett, and to attend the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. At the exposition, he sold autographed photos of himself for twenty-five cents apiece, keeping a dime in profit. On good days, he cleared two dollars.
In the life of Geronimo, Curtis saw much of Chief Joseph, and also a cautionary tale against Indian assimilation. The stories of clinging to the last bit of independence, of elusive escapes and long, dreary imprisonments in a strange land, were not unlike those of the Nez Perce leader. Still, Curtis was in Washington to take pictures, not to redress old wrongs. His outrage would have to be conveyed through his camera. In fashioning Geronimo’s portrait, after persuading him to pose in a separate sitting, Curtis resolved to transmit the truth of a hard man who would give up nothing for sympathy. He photographed him staring into the lens, bonnet on his head, clutching a spear. In that picture he looks shrunken, lost. Then he captured another man: Geronimo in profile, his entire upper body wrapped in a rough woolen blanket. This Geronimo is without a single bit of jewelry or ornamentation, and with only a simple cloth headband, as he used to wear in his youth. This Geronimo is a face—barely half of one—that is deeply lined, just like old Angeline. His brow is furrowed, his chin clenched. He looks away from the camera in a defiant snub for all time. Go to hell!
Not long after the inaugural, the pictures of the Roosevelt family at Sagamore Hill appeared in McClure’s Magazine. The president liked them so much he would use them in his autobiography. The fuss around the first family photos reinforced Curtis’s reputation as the premier portrait photographer in the United States. At the same time, he basked in a prolonged run of national publicity in magazines and big-city newspapers about his Indian work, matching the kind of press he was getting back home. Bird Grinnell’s piece in Scribner’s set the tone:
“It is easy to conceive that if Curtis shall have his health, and shall live for ten years, he will then have accumulated material for the greatest artistic and historical work in American ethnology that has ever been conceived of,” he wrote. “I have never seen pictures relating to Indians which, for fidelity to nature, combined with artistic feeling, can compare with these pictures by Curtis. Today they are of high scientific value. What will they be a hundred years from now when the Indians shall have utterly vanished from the face of the earth?”
Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the first full-time editor of National Geographic Magazine, was equally effusive. “He gave our Geographic Society the most wonderful exhibition last night I have seen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “We had about 1,000 people and they just sat and clapped and clapped. He showed about 130 pictures and they applauded nearly every one, though our audiences are usually very staid.”
For all of the adulation from men in high places, Curtis still could not get the financial backing he needed to continue. Meany was having trouble finding enough donors to bundle a loan. More publicity would help, he suggested. The favorable press seemed without limit; time was something else.
“As you were so good to say that I might write you in regard to this Indian work, I am losing no time in availing myself of the privilege,” Curtis wrote to President Roosevelt, on a dare and a prayer, while in Washington, D.C., for several exhibitions in late 1905. “Trusting I am not asking too much and again thanking you for your great interest in the work.” He requested a letter of introduction to Andrew Carnegie, one of the few tycoons on good terms with Roosevelt and who was planning to give away most of his fortune. Roosevelt didn’t know Carnegie well enough, and also considered him somewhat of a pain in the ass, always with the little nag notes to the president. Other rich men in the country despised Roosevelt, the Republican who had raged against “malefactors of great wealth” and waged court fights to break up their monopolies.
“There is no man of great wealth with whom I am on sufficient close terms to warrant my giving a special letter to him,” Roosevelt replied, understating the obvious. “But you are most welcome to use this letter in talking with any man who has any interest in the subject.” He continued with a stream of superlatives: “I regard the work you have done as one of the most valuable works which any American could do . . . You are making a record of the lives of the Indians which in another decade cannot be made at all, and which it would be the greatest misfortune, from the standpoint alike of the ethnologist and the historian, to leave unmade. You have begun just in time, for these people are at this very moment rapidly losing the distinctive traits and customs which they have slowly developed through the ages.”
It was a gold standard of a letter. The leader of the United States at the peak of his popularity, a prolific author as well, had written an endorsement for a project that was vital to the nation. Curtis read the reply as he prepared for another beggar’s trip to Manhattan in the chill of winter, his last chance to find a way to fully inflate the Big Idea. He would try to win the indifferent heart of the richest man in the world, so called, though he was told that a note on White House stationery would not help—and would probably hurt.
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