![[Image]](images/ShortNightsOfTheShadowCatcher-23.jpg)
Upshaw—Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis’s friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, “perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized,” as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.
FOR NEARLY FOUR YEARS, Curtis saw more of Alexander Upshaw and natives of the northern plains than he did of Clara and Seattle. And what he saw in their last months together was a troubled man whose education had opened his eyes to the impossibility of straddling two worlds. Upshaw spent a typical workday helping Curtis re-create a time when the Crow had their own religion, dress and economy, when nobody called them inferior or immoral. And then he went home at night to a family on a reservation where nearly everything from that past was being scrubbed from the land. Through the seasons, Upshaw was with Curtis on horseback under a searing sun, in snowstorms that blotted out the Montana sky, and in a tent at night until the last candle burned out. The translator roamed all over Indian country with his boss, and had ideas on narrative, picture themes and the many qualities of Apsaroke women. Curtis called him “my great and loyal friend.” Upshaw returned the compliment: the Shadow Catcher, he said, was “a fine man.” Curtis paid him $100 a month—that is, when he paid him at all—far more than any of the hundreds of other Indians he’d employed over the years.
Upshaw was not only an interpreter without equal, but a strategist, helping to design an approach to a given tribe, and a sounding board, not afraid to argue with Curtis. When Upshaw left the winter writing cabin for a one-week translating job before a grand jury, the entire operation nearly came to a halt, Curtis noted. He continued to cut his hair short and dress in the clothes of the conquerors—the discipline of trying to “be a man.” But this warrior’s son seldom got much respect for his effort. The Indian inspector Dalby, who had told Upshaw he would not back his attempt to get his white wife adopted by the Crow, monitored his behavior as if he were on parole. Dalby’s admonitions burned inside him.
“I have read your letter through so often that I can repeat every word of it,” Upshaw wrote Dalby. “As to my future, I have given you my sincere words when I promised I will be a man.”
A man? He couldn’t go into Billings, a proper citizen window-shopping with his wife and three children, without somebody sneering or shouting out at him. A man? He had just helped to lead a highly successful scholarly expedition; he had been crucial to the reconstruction of the Battle of the Little Bighorn; he had annotated and explicated the story of his people; and yet he was still a red monkey in a white man’s shoes. Once, he boarded a local train in Montana with Meany. The two men had just taken their seats at the end of a long day when a cattleman, sitting nearby, started in on Upshaw. He didn’t like Indians, he said loudly, and he didn’t like Upshaw sitting there. He wanted him off the train. It wasn’t anything Upshaw hadn’t heard before, but usually he got it for being with his white wife. Meany stood, towering over the cowboy, and said Upshaw wasn’t going anywhere. At six foot four, with a wild thatch of red hair, the professor could intimidate when he had to. The cowboy backed away. “I don’t think I got the worse of the bout,” Meany wrote Curtis, “and I was glad to defend my Crow friend.”
Upshaw’s father, Crazy Pend d’Oreille, was known for bravery against the Sioux, and it was because of his family’s status that young Upshaw was plucked from Montana and sent to the Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania for nine years. The institution’s mission was to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Upon graduation from Carlisle, Upshaw tried to fit the mold of a remade native. When rumors went out that Upshaw, while visiting a western exhibition in Omaha, had taken part in a staged battle and was dressed in tribal costume, he wrote a sharp rebuttal in the Indian Helper, the school paper. In fact, he’d been in suit and tie, his hair short, he insisted. “Alex would have his schoolmates know that he is trying to be a man, though in the midst of trials and tribulations.” Upshaw also tried to be an evangelical Christian, and to organize a YMCA chapter at the Indian school where he taught in Nebraska. But he didn’t last long at either effort.
With Upshaw as cultural guide, Curtis went deep into Apsaroke society. “Through him I am getting into the heart of the Northern Plains Indian in a way that gives me the greatest satisfaction,” he wrote Hodge. It showed in Volume IV, which became a much-cited and consistently praised work of firsthand ethnology. Indeed, Hodge, who spoke from authority, said the Crow volume “is the best story of Plains Indian life ever written.” The people were described as physically robust—a woman could fell a horse with her fist—healthy and confident. Their strength came in part from fighting other Indians; they had enemies to the north in the Blackfeet, enemies to the east in the Sioux, and enemies to the south in the Cheyenne. They roamed an area equal in size to New England. With the bounty from the plains keeping them fed, they had time to spend on decorative arts. “The nature of their life gave the Apsaroke a great deal of comparative leisure,” Curtis wrote, “and they delighted in fashioning fine garments from skins and embroidering them in striking colors.”
A young man trolling for women would ride on horseback nearly naked through a village, singing, “I am merely staying on earth for a time; all women look upon me!” Along with the words to that song, Curtis included the music, publishing a sheet with the notes. Sex was celebrated. So, while Dalby said in 1908 that the Crow were “devoid of any moral sense in connection with their sexual relations,” Curtis came away with the opposite impression, writing at the same time. They are “certainly an unusually sensual people,” he explained in Volume IV, but that did not mean they are “lax in morals.” And in such digressions, a reader could almost hear Upshaw whispering in the ear of the author: consider, Curtis told his readers, that an Indian may find many customs in American society that are “highly objectionable and immoral.”
What fascinated Curtis about Upshaw, friend and subject, was his duality. It also worried him. He could see the strain in a face turning harder by the day. As early as 1905, Curtis could sense that inner conflict was gnawing away at Upshaw. Curtis doubted that a “coat of educational whitewash,” as he called the years at Carlisle, would be enough to cover the Indian in him. Not long after becoming Upshaw’s friend, Curtis predicted that he would “die and go to the god of his fathers.” Upshaw drank, though alcohol was outlawed on the reservation. He pushed back when a white man struck him, though such a reaction could bring a felony assault charge. He was not submissive. He used words that his neighbors had never heard—English words. “In some respects, he is the most remarkable man I ever saw,” Curtis said in one interview. “He is perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized.” In that sense, Upshaw was the embodiment of a first-rate mind, defined later in the century by F. Scott Fitzgerald—a man who could hold two opposing ideas at the same time and still be able to function. Upshaw did it one better: he lived two opposing lives.
The pictures in Volume IV also benefited from Upshaw’s access to Indian lives. The people were photographed as if they were family members, with a closeness that comes from long association. A Crow named Shot In The Hand is shown in high-relief profile, his chin and nose like a ridge worn by the wind, mouth in tight grimace. His bronzed head sits atop a mountain of dove-white quills, beading, animal skins and ornaments. The main source of the Custer revisionism, White Man Runs Him, is displayed in an unromantic close-up, with prominent facial scars. Portraits of Two Leggings, Wolf, Red Wing, Fog In The Morning and Hoop In The Forehead provide a wealth of detail on the jewelry worn by prominent men. Let Dalby and the Bureau of Indian Affairs insist that the Crow strip themselves of the ancient trappings of class and privilege; in the Curtis portfolio, that glory had one more showing. From the field came winter scenes, shot not far from the writing cabin, like a woman carrying a bundle of twigs to an ice-wrapped tipi, trudging through an expanse of snow—the photographic equivalent of a Tolstoy description of a peasant. And Curtis also included, in the plates of Volume IV, a portrait of Upshaw himself, who was thanked in the introduction. The picture, titled simply Upshaw—Apsaroke, displays a face that is somewhat mournful, the eyes liquid, as if he were close to tears. Upshaw leans on his right elbow, a traditional pose. Most revealing, he wears a head bonnet, fourteen rows of shell necklaces and long hooped earrings, and he’s shirtless. This Upshaw is an Indian like his father, not someone else’s definition of a man.
In the summer of 1908, Curtis sent Upshaw to the Dakota north country, along the high, wind-lashed banks of the Missouri River, to start building relations with the Mandan. This tribe had been instrumental in keeping the Lewis and Clark expedition alive, providing them winter quarters in their big earthen lodges, showing them how to find food and comfort in one of the coldest places on the plains. It was at the Mandan winter camp that Sacagawea, a Shoshone slave, was won in a gambling contest by an American member of the expedition. The artist George Catlin spent considerable time with the Mandan in 1833, trying to capture on canvas what Curtis was now doing with glass plates. A smallpox epidemic nearly wiped out the tribe; a count in 1837 found only 137 people. For survival, they joined forces with two other groups, the Arikara and Hidatsa. Their reservation, originally eight million acres by treaty, was being whittled down to less than a million acres when the Curtis party arrived.
As before, Upshaw was able to work his way deep into the community, and after two months he reported back to Curtis on a variety of good subjects. Curtis shot the Arikara medicine ceremony, adults with full-sized bear skins draped over themselves, the resulting pictures as animated as anything in the entire North American Indian. The men were trying to assume some of the strength of a bear, and the animal’s spiritual power, as part of a larger prayer offering for rain and food. To the Arikara, all animals had souls, though trees and stones were inanimate. “This remarkable ceremony of the medicine fraternity of the Arikara has long been dormant,” Curtis wrote, “the agency officials having suppressed it about 1885.” He had arranged for “remnants of the fraternity” of bear medicine men to perform the outlawed ritual.
Curtis also took pictures of men offering buffalo skulls to the sky, and of women gathering berries, and he learned that the punishment for a man who committed adultery was to have one of his horses shot. The most memorable portrait was of Bear’s Belly, who wears a full skin, with the bear’s snout on his head and the arms, legs and back of the animal’s thick hide covering his own. His face and the upper part of his chest are open to the camera; he looks like a northern plains version of a centaur—half bear, half man.
The real prize, Upshaw told Curtis, was something less flashy: the small, sacred turtle drum of the Mandan, “the object of greatest veneration.” Upshaw befriended the priest who kept the effigies, a pair of buffalo-skin-wrapped drums in the shape of turtles. It would severely upset the Mandan, the translator said, should Curtis press for access. “The Mandans asserted that no white man had ever touched or had more than a possible glimpse of them,” Curtis wrote in his notes of the visit. “Naturally this intrigued me.” The guardian of the turtles was a man named Packs Wolf, who lived away from the main tribe in a log cabin. For several days, Upshaw went to see him, returning with the same news: the turtles were off-limits. Upshaw upped the payment offer. Negotiations continued. Finally, after a high fee was agreed to, permission was granted. It felt sneaky, somewhat dirty, money for spiritual access. Curtis knew such an unveiling would be “an unethical affair,” as he wrote, but such were the unseemly methods of field anthropology.
On a chilly morning, Curtis and Upshaw went to Packs Wolf’s cabin. “It was made clear to me this business was being done without permission of the tribe,” Curtis wrote, and if others found out, “dire things could happen to all of us.” Curtis and Upshaw were told to strip in preparation for a purifying ritual in the sweat lodge. They could not enter the House of the Turtles without first cleansing themselves, Packs Wolf explained. They spent the better part of a day inside a dome-shaped willow lodge with a pit of hot rocks in the middle. As sweat poured out and steam rose from their skin, Upshaw thought Curtis would pass out. Not to worry, the photographer said: he’d been through many a sweat bath and knew what to expect. The next day, they were ushered into the turtle domain, a log house dimly lit by two small windows. The priest brought out two objects, tightly wrapped in buffalo skin with an outer layer of feathers. Curtis wanted to peel away the feathers to see the turtles. A fresh round of negotiations ensued, with Upshaw again doing the bargaining for his boss. Curtis was vague in his account of what happened next. He wrote in Volume V that “unexpected permission was granted to photograph them without the feathers.” He was ordered not to turn the turtles over—“if you do all people will die.” Curtis, his nerves unsteady, trembled as he made several exposures. Outside the cabin, a group of Mandan on horseback approached. The turtle temple had been violated. No, no, the Indians were told, the Curtis party had only been discussing turtle lore—no pictures had been taken.
Later, Curtis felt triumphant. “I am more than happy to tell you that we actually got our hands on the sacred turtle of the Mandans and secured pictures of them,” he wrote Meany from Minot, North Dakota. The finished picture, The Sacred Turtles, shows two small, quite ordinary objects of tightly stitched buffalo skin in afternoon light on the floor. Their power, of course, was in what they represented—spirits harnessed from all over the Dakotas. In rationalizing his actions, Curtis said, “Fortunately, taking a picture leaves no mark.” But it may have left a mark on Upshaw, acting as the agent of betrayal of fellow Indians.
Throughout 1908, the first volumes of the Curtis magnum opus came under critical scrutiny from high places in Europe and the United States. Curtis had steeled himself, expecting to take a few hits. They never understood him, the culture czars. They were jealous. His work showed how lazy they had been in their thinking, how so many of their ideas were nonsense. He wrote Hodge of one snub by a “Doctor Cullen,” from an institute in Brooklyn, who had declined to purchase a subscription. The learned man didn’t like the photographer because of “my failing to comprehend his personal deification,” Curtis explained to Hodge. “On seeing him in the lobby of a Portland hotel I stepped up to his Highness and laid my profane hand on his shoulder and spoke to him with the familiarity of an equal.” But Curtis’s defensiveness was unnecessary—the latest reviews were stunning.
From the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard came a note from Professor F. W. Putnam, rapturous in his commendation of “your great work.” He had met Curtis some years before and was an early enthusiast. Now, after seeing some of the finished product, he praised the scholarship. In particular, he said the anthropology and ethnology were of the highest order, considerably advancing the work of those fields. Came another, from Review of Reviews: “The North American Indian cannot be compared with any publishing venture in the annals of American bookmaking, or indeed in those of any other nation.” An old Curtis mentor, C. Hart Merriam—one of the men he’d rescued on Mount Rainier a decade earlier—wrote an unqualified endorsement: “Every American who sees the work will be proud that so handsome a piece of book-making has been produced in America; and every intelligent man will rejoice that ethnology and history have been enriched by such faithful and artistic records of the aboriginal inhabitants of our country.”
That was a Washington Post headline of a story touting “one of the most remarkable and expensive publications ever planned.” From Geneva came a formal letter from Dr. Herman ten Kate, a leading European intellectual: “You are doing a magnificent thing, building not only an everlasting monument to a vanishing race, but also to yourself. I am sure that if the Indians could realize the value and purpose of your work, and perhaps a few of them do, they would be grateful to you. In fact, viewed in a certain light, your work constitutes a redemption of the many wrongs our ‘superior’ race has done to the Indian. Some passages you wrote are masterly.”
Those “many wrongs” inflicted on small nations by the much larger one continued to trouble Upshaw. The Crow reservation, on an ownership map, now looked like a quilt made of several thousand square scraps. Not only was the tribe still losing people—in a generation’s time, the population had been cut in half—but its reservation was being carved out from under them. Much of the good land, with its pasturage for cattle and its well-watered valleys for growing grain, had passed into white hands. In all respects, the modern age meant only one thing—decline.
“You are decreasing at the rate of three percent a year,” Curtis lamented to Upshaw one night as he went over census numbers. “Take this pencil and figure out your own solution.” Upshaw didn’t have to do a calculation.
“If I live to be an old man there will be none of my people left,” he said.
“There will be a few left,” Curtis replied—but only those who can master the ways of the dominant culture.
When Upshaw wasn’t at Curtis’s side, he was in court, or in meetings with state politicians—the public face and mouthpiece of the Crow. He started to push back in his correspondence with the imperious government overseer Dalby. The lord of Indian country in Montana had mentioned that he was off to Washington, D.C., for congressional hearings. Instead of his usual lip service about trying to “be a man,” Upshaw was direct. It was crucial that the Indian inspector stand up “in this trying time in order to get justice.”
In the last full month of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, Curtis was invited to Washington for an informal sit-down with the writer-politician who had done so much for an unknown man from Seattle. Curtis raised an improbable idea with Upshaw: why not go with him to the White House? There, he could argue his people’s case.
In late February of 1909, Washington society opened its doors to the Shadow Catcher and his Indian friend. The president was the subject of much speculation over whether he would try to return to power in four years. Not a chance—he was off to Africa, he insisted, done with politics. The balloon figure of William Howard Taft, a walrus-mustachioed midwesterner given to long naps and multiple-course early-bird dinners, would soon be president. For Roosevelt, it was time to play again. He asked Curtis, who’d been such a kinetic companion at Teddy’s Sagamore Hill home, if he wanted to come along as photographer of his upcoming African safari. Curtis was flattered, but had no time for a yearlong diversion.
Exhibitions at galleries, clubs and the homes of political elites filled the Curtis calendar for the first few days in Washington. He was honored at a reception attended by Roosevelt and Taft, by ambassadors, counts, foreign ministers and “a score of the most prominent people in Washington’s social and scientific circles,” the Post reported. In its pages, Curtis was described as “perhaps the greatest living authority on Indian lore and Indian life in general.” Despite such accolades, he had yet to snag a subscription from the Smithsonian. While in the East, he did manage to get Andrew Carnegie to sign on for a single set of the books, and he used the praise from prominent figures to add an additional few to his list. The checks passed quickly through Curtis’s account and into those of Hodge, Myers, Upshaw, the printers in Boston and other creditors.
Curtis and the Crow native walked into the White House on the afternoon of February 25. Roosevelt was hearty in his greeting and open to hearing Upshaw’s case, at least for a few moments. That was all well and good, he said quickly, but the Indian should take up his grievances with the new man, Taft. They toured the White House, they shared a meal, they talked of mountain ranges and rivers in the West and of wild creatures on the Dakota plains. Such lovely country, all of it. And the work of Curtis—it was bully! Curtis thanked him again for his contribution to The North American Indian, and Roosevelt said it was nothing; he was humbled to be a part of something so monumental.
EXPLORER AT THE WHITE HOUSE
The Washington Post had numerous errors in its story on the visit, calling the grammar school dropout “Professor Curtis” and claiming he was an “explorer” of Indian lands, rather than someone who took pictures and explained cultures. The article said his work would be finished in two years. Hah! Only five of the planned twenty volumes had been published. The paper asserted there was no truth to the rumor that Curtis would accompany Roosevelt to Africa. As for the “copper-skinned” companion, Alexander B. Upshaw, at least his presence was noted. The Post called him “a full-blooded Crow Indian,” but never gave his name. At his supreme moment of influence, this delegate from an old nation in Montana side by side with the president, the educated, assimilated native, was not a man with a name, just an Indian—a full-blooded one at that.
Later that year, as Curtis made plans for fieldwork with his Indian aide in New Mexico and the Columbia River Plateau, came shocking news from Montana.
EDUCATED CROW DIES IN JAIL
Upshaw’s body was found on the floor of an icy cell, the story in the Billings Gazette said, blood splattered on the bars. He died of pneumonia, the paper reported. He had been on a drinking spree, and was arrested after someone found him in a dingy hotel room in town. In jail he started vomiting blood until it killed him. “He is survived by a wife, a white woman,” the paper said, “whose marriage to the young graduate of Carlisle caused quite a sensation.” Members of the Crow Nation told a different story to people who’d worked for Curtis in Montana: they said Upshaw had been murdered. The details were sketchy, but this version had Upshaw in an argument with several white men. Punches flew. Upshaw was severely beaten, then dragged off to jail to die.
Curtis was heartbroken. His close friend, his best interpreter—perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized—was gone, left in a frigid jail cell to gag on his own blood. They finished each other’s sentences, these two, and in the writing of The North American Indian Upshaw often did that for Curtis as well. The life had been snuffed out of Upshaw at the age of thirty-eight. On the reservation, the death of the most remarkable man Curtis had ever met was noted only for how unremarkable it was for an Indian to die so young.
![[Image]](images/ShortNightsOfTheShadowCatcher-24.jpg)
![[Image]](images/ShortNightsOfTheShadowCatcher-25.jpg)