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Shore of Shoalwater Bay, 1912. Curtis spent more time with Indians of the Northwest Coast than with any other natives. He wanted to capture the essence of daily life in a thick-forested land by the sea.
BACKSTAGE AT CARNEGIE HALL, Curtis waited for the lights to dim and the orchestra to finish tuning up. When the hum of chatter died down, he peeked out at a house packed with pink-jowled swells in stiff-collared tuxedos and women with jewels glittering atop perfumed décolletage. The New York social set had paid top dollar to listen to the Shadow Catcher talk about savages. And more than talk: he was presenting “The Story of a Vanishing Race,” a picture opera. But tonight’s offering was not purely opera. Nor was it all static picture show. This touring spectacle was a uniquely Curtis hybrid. The visuals were slides from the photographer’s work over a fifteen-year span. He had painstakingly hand-colored the slides, so that rock walls at sunset in Canyon de Chelly had an apricot glow, and the faces shot at the magic hour in New Mexico gave off a rugged blush. Montana’s altocumulus-clouded ceiling could never be the true robin’s-egg blue, but it was close. Using a stereopticon projector, or magic lantern as it was called, Curtis could dissolve two colored-tinted pictures, creating narrative motion. He supplemented the stills with film, some of it sandpaper-grainy and herky-jerky, but still—action! And all of these images buttressed a story, narrated by Curtis himself, about an epic tragedy: the slow fade of a people who had lived fascinating lives long before the grandparents of those in Carnegie box seats sailed from Old Europe to seize their homeland. What made the entire experience memorable was the music, from an orchestra playing a score conducted by the renowned Henry F. Gilbert and inspired by the recordings of Indian songs and chants that Curtis had brought home on his wax cylinders. Gilbert had been among the first popular composers to use black gospel music and ragtime. He now took on the challenge of translating Indian music through conventional instruments. The whole of it was a visual-aural feast of the aboriginal, as the critics called it, created by a most American artist at the height of his fame.
Curtis was pleased to see that “The Story of a Vanishing Race” was a sellout, especially in Manhattan. There was no more prestigious interior space in the land than Carnegie’s Main Hall, two blocks from Central Park, a venue then twenty years old and home to the New York Philharmonic. But when he looked from behind the curtain one last time, his heart sank at the absence of a single person—Belle da Costa Greene. Curtis had written her from the road, from Boston, with updates of the reviews and crowds as the production rolled through Concord, Providence, Manchester and New Haven on the way to New York. The show was a hit. Capacity crowds! Standing ovations! Rave reviews! He enclosed tickets—front row, of course—for J. P. Morgan, Miss Greene and any number in their entourage. On November 15, 1911, the day of the Carnegie show, came a reply from the librarian: Morgan would be spending the evening with his daughter. “As you know, it is very difficult to get him to go anywhere,” Greene wrote Curtis at his hotel.
Yes, of course he knew. Since obtaining the initial financing in 1906, Curtis had seen very little of Morgan, despite long stays in Manhattan. “He spends his time lunching with kings or kaisers or buying Raphaels,” said a British patron. The cigar, the top hat, the cane, the hideous purple nose—Curtis experienced very little of the Morgan persona after signing his initial deal. The face of the titan, if not the hand that wrote the checks, was in the person of the enchanting gray-eyed Miss Greene. So, while Curtis didn’t expect the aging Morgan to trundle uptown on a November night, he held out hope that the public representative of his patron would be in attendance on the evening of his highest honor. Earlier that year, he had taken his son Harold to visit Belle Greene at the Morgan Library. Hal was impressed at the setting and people in the rich man’s circle who knew and praised his father.
In her reply to Curtis’s invitation, Greene was cryptic about her plans for the night, sending “our best wishes for your success in your lecture this evening.” It wasn’t a lecture, damnit! This was something new, groundbreaking, a picture opera. Here was a chance for Belle to see Curtis in another light. Not the desperate man of those lengthy letters from some distant outpost, answering accounting questions, begging for more time, another check in advance, please, please, Miss Greene. Not the harried, deadline-driven artist whose latest installments always carried a note of apology for the tardiness of the publication schedule. Yes, he knew he’d promised Morgan to deliver twenty volumes in five years, and with the time almost expired on their agreement, he was just bringing out the eighth volume. He was reminded regularly that he was woefully short of the five hundred subscriptions he’d promised to sell as a way to keep himself from going back to the well of the tycoon. So be it, Curtis told himself: doing something world class meant deadlines and dollars were never going to fall in line.
Belle Greene did not lack for a social schedule, most of it on behalf of Morgan. At night, she liked to be seen, and was known to drink and flirt with people ranging from the archbishop to the artist yet to sell a first painting. By day, though, she was all business. “If a person is a worm,” she once said, “you step on him.” She wrote many of Morgan’s letters. She bought gifts that he presented to others as his own thoughtful touch. She gossiped, in private parlors and in letter form, about the mistresses of Mr. Morgan. She posed for the painter Paul César Helleu, who presented her in a regal side profile. And, most importantly, her influence over what artifacts of artistic or literary merit would find their way into Morgan’s library had expanded as the rich man grew befuddled and sluggish in his eighth decade. The secret of her past was intact, though still subject to much speculation. Her father was far out of sight, living at the world’s edge in a diplomatic post in Siberia. Belle had not spoken to him in at least ten years. And she kept lying about her age: was she twenty-five or thirty? “She moved her birth date around like a potted plant,” the Morgan biographer Jean Strouse wrote. At the time that Curtis was hoping to impress her at Carnegie Hall, Belle was twenty-seven years old and in an open love affair with a married man, Bernard Berenson, a Renaissance art historian whose principal home was a hillside villa outside Florence. How could Curtis compete with that?
For adulation, he had to settle on the man who introduced him that night in New York, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. A nephew of J. P. Morgan, Osborn was wealthy by birth, hugely influential in some circles, and largely in the Curtis camp. He was also a kook who believed, like other educated men of his age, in the inferiority of some races and their inherent criminality, which could be determined by the size of a person’s skull. He had even written President Roosevelt, going on at length about the head size of people from Sicily, implying that the great wave of Italian immigration sweeping over the United States was not a good thing, and raising concern about “the blending of long-skulled and short-skulled types.” In other writings, he said the “Negroid race” was in a “state of arrested brain development” because blacks had come from hot equatorial climes that did not foster intellectual advancement. (How might he explain the intelligence and charm of Miss Greene, his uncle’s keeper, had he known she was from a black family?) Nordic whites came in for much praise, defined as “broad-headed, gray-eyed Alpines or Celts, short of stature, very Irish in appearance, but without the excitable Irish temperament.”
Though such nonsense passed for science in the highest New York circles, Curtis would have none of it. His theme, consistent from the beginning, was that Indians were spiritual, adaptive people with complex societies. They had been massively misunderstood from the start of their encounters with European settlers, and were passing away before the eyes of a generation, mostly through no fault of their own. For them, the present was all of decline, the future practically nonexistent, the past glorious.
“The average conception of the Indian is as a cruel, blood-reeking warrior, a vigorous huntsman, a magnificent paint-and-feather-bedecked specimen of primitive man,” said Curtis in a full-page profile in the New York Times, reading from his talking points for the picture opera. “Of such we have no end of mental pictures, but to the wonderful inner and devotional life we are largely strangers.” The Times praised Curtis for the work he had done to preserve tribal languages—twenty-nine vocabularies, recorded and transcribed, thus far. The paper was one of the few institutions to notice this remarkable feat. “Five hundred years from now the value of this work will be beyond all calculation,” the Times said. “And it is chiefly for posterity that he and Mr. Morgan are working.” But for the first time, in print, Curtis revealed the bare truth about his schedule. He was far, far behind, he acknowledged: it would take at least eight more years, until 1919, to finish all twenty volumes.
Osborn appeared nervous as he introduced the man now heralded as the world’s foremost expert on American Indians; his voice was weak, tinny, and he failed to rouse the audience. But as the house lights dimmed and the orchestra burst into sound, as images filled the screen and Curtis walked to the side of the stage to read his words, Carnegie Hall was transformed. Gilbert conducted the musicians with one hand and guided the projectionist with the other, synchronizing pictures with music. The screen jumped to life with terraced houses reaching into a desert sky and deep gorges where the first Americans still lived, followed by pictures of slender canoes in the crashing Pacific surf, whirling rapids of the Columbia River, the wind-raked high plains east of Glacier National Park, the red earthen pueblos of New Mexico.
“My greatest desire tonight is that each and every person here enter into the spirit of our evening with the Indians. We cannot weigh, measure or judge their culture with our philosophy. From our analytical and materialistic viewpoint, theirs is a strange world. Deity . . . is everywhere present.” And off Curtis went on his oratorical flight, explaining the Great Mystery, the logic behind fasting and sweat lodges, the offerings to the sun, to snakes and to cedar. But it was wrong to see nothing more than primitive animism in these rituals. “It is often said of certain tribes that they are sun-worshippers,” Curtis told the audience. “To call them sun-worshippers is, I believe, in most instances about as nearly right as it would be to call all Christian people cross-worshippers. In other words, the sun is but the symbol of the power.”
The music swelled as the painted slides passed by, featuring faces to match the surroundings: deeply lined elders on a bluff and smooth-cheeked maidens nearly naked by a waterway, idyllic in their settings but also, especially in the portraits, steely and recalcitrant. Just look at Joseph, and Geronimo, and Red Hawk. Men who never sold out their people, hauled off to prisons far from the lands of their birth, then sent to their graves in humiliation. He let these dead warriors glare at the Carnegie crowd, a bit of psychic revenge. The cinematic portion of the night included the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo and the Hopi Snake Dance that Curtis had participated in.
The audience loved it. They were “lifted out of the prosaic into the wild, romantic life of the redman,” the New York Evening World wrote. A few days later, Curtis was given an equally rapturous reception in Washington, at the Belasco Theater, where he entertained a sold-out crowd that included foreign ambassadors, judges, senators and President Taft. “A pictorial and musical gem,” the Washington Times called it. Roosevelt was not in town, having vacated the White House more than two years earlier, but he sent Curtis a note praising him for doing “a good thing for the whole American people.” Curtis was hailed by one paper as “a rare interpretive artist,” and by another as “at once a national institution and a national benefit.” And lo, shortly thereafter, he finally cracked the thick sandstone walls of the Smithsonian Castle: the board agreed to buy a full subscription of The North American Indian. Writing to Meany, Curtis was euphoric at the reaction. In New York, Osborn had turned to him and said Curtis had just won over an audience “that few men in their lifetime have the privilege of facing.” One night, a show at the Brooklyn Institute got off to a rough start with a host, the scientist Franklin Hooper, who was skeptical of Curtis’s contributions to native scholarship. By curtain’s close, Hooper told Curtis he was the first man to give “the real Indian” to an American audience.
“Dear Brother Meany,” Curtis reported on his New York appearances, “the enthusiasm was quite out of the ordinary.” As usual, this triumph had come with no small amount of sweat and pain. “I passed through 17 kinds of hell in getting this thing underway.” In a rare breach of modesty, Curtis confided that he might allow himself to revel in his reviews—if only for a moment. Go ahead and gloat, Meany advised. “You are too sensible to let your head swell too much, but the temptation would certainly entrap an ordinary mortal.” The swelling could never last anyway, Curtis indicated. In a letter to his editor Hodge, after recounting all the standing ovations, all the over-the-top reviews, the record crowds, the grueling pace (five shows a week), Curtis once again found himself in a familiar redoubt. “Just at the present moment we are somewhat broke.”
The picture opera was supposed to solve the money woes that had shadowed Curtis ever since he abandoned a prosperous life of studio photography to hitch his years to Indian pictures. A fresh infusion of cash from Morgan, $60,000 in late 1909, went straight to Curtis’s creditors. As a condition of that new money, Morgan had Curtis incorporate The North American Indian and put the operation in the hands of a board of directors in New York. The decision would haunt Curtis, but he was out of options. The 1910 fieldwork—on the Columbia, along the Pacific Coast of Washington and among tribes of Vancouver Island—had been conducted on a shoestring, without money for interpreters or an aide to handle logistics. And since Curtis had also moved out of his house—“address me at the Rainier Club, as usual,” he told Hodge beginning in 1910—he had to set aside a certain number of hours to earn his room and board. By the summer of 1911, Curtis was faced with putting the Indian project on indefinite hold. It would be the first summer in more than a decade when he didn’t spend all his time on tribal land. He was embarrassed, humbled, his confidence rattled, as he finally told his editor the truth about his impoverishment. “Outside of some absolute miracle there is no chance whatever for my getting funds for field work this year,” he wrote Hodge.
It was while stuck in this eddy of despair that Curtis had come up with the idea of the traveling picture opera. The Curtis name was enough to quickly attract backers, who set up an itinerary stretching over two years. A business agent booked halls, found musicians and arranged screen setups, hotels and other work. Curtis hoped that the tour would generate enough money to get his team back into Indian country, the only place where he now felt at home. But by early fall, just as Curtis was about to launch the road show, he was already physically spent. Simultaneously, he had tried to finish the fieldwork with Columbia River tribes, initiate photographic forays among Northwest Coast Indians and handle the myriad tasks of putting together a traveling picture opera production. It was no exaggeration when Curtis was told he was trying to do the work of fifty men. For the second time in two years, he was confined to his bed at the Rainier Club. He collapsed in exhaustion.
After rousing himself for fresh touring in 1912, he took a break of sorts in the summer to work with the tribes that lived along the Pacific shore, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca north. He also managed a quick trip to the Southwest, an opposite climate. After spending time with the Hopi in 1900, 1902, 1904, 1906 and 1911, this latest visit was both jarring and familiar. No tribe had been more welcoming, save perhaps some members of the Crow. He knew enough of the language to greet old friends, and he knew enough of the religion to take umbrage at the creeping vines of missionaries moving over Hopi land. He was startled by how much things had changed. Automobiles rambled along ancient sheep paths. Packaged and powdered food from the government was taking the dietary place of traditional dried meat or cornmeal. The children, back from boarding school, had short hair. Curtis felt fortunate that he had taken so many pictures early on, for there was little of original Hopi life left to be seen, he complained. The habits and routines of daily existence, refined over centuries, had been swapped for those of mainstream America. For the anthropologist, whether a self-educated one with a camera or a pedigreed one backed by a federal grant, there is nothing more disappointing than the banality of modern life.
His views of God had expanded considerably since his days as a boy in a canoe with the colicky preacher and his Bible verses. Early on, Curtis came to believe that the key to getting deep inside the Indian world was to try to understand—and experience, if possible—its religion. He rarely proclaimed the superiority of a Christian deity over one that was alive in the rocks or a small creature. In his enlarged tolerance for the native spiritual world, Curtis grew increasingly impatient with those who tried to impose a dominant religious orthodoxy on these people. And, no doubt, self-interest was at stake: his life’s toil, after all, was devoted to Indians “still retaining their primitive ways.” Could his camera ever find anything in a church pew, the men in clipped and combed hair, the women with dowdy shawls, to match a naked priest in glorious body paint at dawn?
Curtis had been questioned while on tour about his picture opera’s title and the theme that ran through every volume of his work: vanishing race. To the surprise of some authorities, the census of 1910 counted 276,000 Indians in the United States—a gain of 39,000 over 1900. Yet Indians made up less than a single percent of the nation’s 92 million people. But vanishing? How could that be if the overall numbers were going in a positive direction? Several scholars, quoted in Curtis profiles in the newspapers, started to take issue with him. “We have as many Indians now as ever existed in the United States,” said one authority in the New York Times.
Curtis called that “an absolutely ridiculous statement.” He said the census had been too broad, counting those with just a strand of Indian heritage. Curtis estimated only about 100,000 “purebloods” were left from shore to shore. He explained what he had witnessed over the past ten years. Along the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark had seen thousands of people in numerous communities, Curtis found only two small villages with a combined population of less than 200. Around the greater Puget Sound area, where the government had estimated 75,000 natives at treaty time, “today there are scarcely 2,000,” said Curtis. The Crow had gone from a population of 9,000 in the nineteenth century to 1,787 in the twentieth. The Atsina numbered barely 500, down by 75 percent. The Piegan, who once counted 12,000 members, now had barely a tenth of that. All the evidence—again, as he saw among the Hopi—was of diminishment and loss. Curtis cited Geronimo’s own words, from his ghostwritten autobiography of 1906, in which he said, “We are vanishing from the earth.” Geronimo himself had recently left the planet, after he got drunk one night and fell off a horse-drawn wagon.
Beyond that, raw population figures were not the crux of the issue. Religion, lifestyle, language—fast disappearing. “Whether the American aborigines are a vanishing race or not, the vital question is one of culture rather than of numbers,” he said in defense of his work. In his public appearances Curtis was often asked: in a generation’s time, would anything be left of the real Indian? And on occasion would come a rejoinder, though not from him: it’s not up to a white photographer to define authenticity.
In the fall of 1912, he was back on the road with the picture opera, the same routine as earlier, till the end of the year. The tour was a runaway success, judging by the reviews and the crowds, but it did not make Curtis financially whole. In business matters he was a consistent failure, and his hard-luck streak continued with this production. Like a lot of artists, Curtis had a reverse Midas touch: the creative dream, stoked by audacity, always trumped pragmatic concerns. A more earthbound man would have made a radical change in plans when troubling signs appeared at the first stagings of the musical. Ticket sales were strong, but after paying for everything Curtis came up short—$300 to $500 per show, even after sellouts. Road expenses were much higher than he had anticipated. “Cheer up,” he wrote Hodge, a bit of springy sarcasm creeping into his voice, “the worst is yet to come.”
Indeed, a few months later he was staring at bankruptcy. “My losses during the winter have been very heavy,” he confided to one friend, halfway into the tour. He took out loans from J. P. Morgan, though he tried to keep it secret, for these were not the kind of patron-and-artist deals of earlier days that had been sent to the newspapers for favorable headlines; this was survival money, at 6 percent interest. Two promissory notes in the Morgan archive, one for $12,500, another for $5,000, show Curtis going deeper into his benefactor’s keep. No matter: he would never give up, he explained to the House of Morgan. His written list of subscribers included the following names:
HIS MAJESTY, GEORGE, KING OF ENGLAND
HIS MAJESTY, ALBERT, KING OF THE BELGIANS
ANDREW CARNEGIE
MRS. E. H. HARRIMAN
JAMES J. HILL
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
MRS. FREDERICK VANDERBILT
H. E. HUNTINGTON
S. R. GUGGENHEIM
COL. ALDEN BLETHEN
GIFFORD PINCHOT
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
He was hustling the Vatican, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis, and more than three dozen institutions, ranging from the National Library of Wales to the Spokane Public Library. More than ever, he was two people: the public Curtis, celebrated onstage, fussed over by some of the most famous names in the Western world, and the private Curtis, a lonely man without a permanent home, who couldn’t display two nickels that he hadn’t borrowed from someone else. Curtis had obtained a $3,000 loan from Pinchot, who was ginning up Teddy Roosevelt’s independent run for the presidency on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. The prickly forester was quite the nag on the repayment schedule, and the money may have been more bother than it was worth. In a long explanation for Morgan’s staff on how he had come up so short, Curtis blamed his youth and naïveté at the time when the titan first agreed to fund him. The terms of the contract, in which Curtis worked for free and had to rely on advance payments of $3,000 per subscription just to bring the books out, were fatally flawed. Expenses far exceeded income. His team never rested, having traveled enough “to encircle the globe twenty times.” He accepted the blame, and faulted himself for letting early flattery overwhelm common sense. “Frankly, being young then, I did not properly discount the enthusiastic commendation and gush,” he wrote. To Belle Greene he was more candid, confiding his deepest fear: that the great project was not just stalled, but was over—dead well before its finish.
“It is with considerable hesitation that I speak in this way,” he wrote Greene, “but it is only fair that you have knowledge of the situation.” With her, he said, he felt “a sympathetic interest” in the work. He explained how he had given his life to creating a lasting record of the continent’s first people, and in so doing, “I have made about every sacrifice a human being can for the sake of the work, and the work is worth it.” Long gone from the pages of that letter was any trace of the cocksure Shadow Catcher who strode into Morgan’s den in 1906 and walked out a King of the World. Now he spoke of posterity and the greater good, like his preacher father appealing for funds to do the Lord’s work. His Indian volumes would belong to the ages, and for that “the people of the American continent will look upon it as one of Mr. Morgan’s greatest gifts to man.” The stunning news in this letter, buried deep, was that even if he could get back on his feet financially, Curtis would need many more years than he’d envisioned to complete all twenty volumes. Originally, of course, he told Morgan he could finish in five years. Then, to the New York Times, he had stretched that deadline to thirteen years. Now he told Belle Greene, “field research is a matter of twenty-three to twenty-five years.” Yes, a generation’s time, and maybe then some, was needed. By that calculation, Curtis might not be done until 1931—an eternity.
At the same time, Curtis no longer held back in press interviews when asked about government treatment of Indians. Once he’d crossed his own line with Volume VIII, on the Nez Perce, he didn’t hesitate to express open contempt. Clipped of his confidence and much of his sense of self-worth, Curtis was more empathetic toward the beaten subjects he photographed. “We have wronged the Indian from the beginning,” he said in a lengthy magazine profile. “The white man’s sins against him did not cease with the explosion of the final cartridge in the wars which subjugated him in his own country. Our sins of peace . . . have been far greater than our sins of war . . . In peace, we changed the nature of our weapons, that was all; we stopped killing Indians in more or less a fair fight, debauching them, instead, thus slaughtering them by methods which gave them not the slightest chance of retaliation.”
When the show landed in Seattle in the fall of 1912, Curtis was greeted by a fawning crowd at the city’s opera house. Onstage were fake rocks and real totem poles. In the orchestra pit was a twenty-two-piece ensemble. Meany introduced his friend to the audience, was lavish in praise and then beamed throughout the production. Curtis’s daughters applauded wildly; their phantom father was home, and everyone loved him. The city embraced its most famous citizen. He retired late at night to his bunk at the Rainier Club, the huzzahs still ringing in his ears.
Curtis sized up his years: he was almost midway through a masterpiece, hailed as such from coast to coast. Eight volumes had been published. If one of the streetcars clanking up and down the hills of Seattle ran over Curtis, his place in history would be assured. “Such a big dream,” as he originally told Bird Grinnell, could actually be realized, though perhaps not in the span of a single man’s lifetime. Nonetheless, an epic achievement. His personal life was a disaster—facing bankruptcy and a failed marriage. His mother was ill, his estranged wife could not stand the sight of him, and he was not on speaking terms with his brother Asahel. Curtis’s debts were in excess of $50,000, and he had less than $150 in the bank. He had told Hodge that “if I had an earthly thing that was not mortgaged, I should immediately start out to find some one to loan me a few dollars on it.” The larger problem, should he ever crawl out of this financial sinkhole, was that by the end of 1912, J. P. Morgan owned Curtis.
Now to the positive side. His children loved him, and he talked of bringing them into the business. Beth, as a teenager, showed an adult’s understanding of what was required to make a great picture in the studio, and she had infinite energy, just like her father. The two standout talents on his staff, Bill Myers on the book project and Adolph Muhr in the studio, were still with him, as was Ella McBride. Their work had never been better. Money came mainly from selling Indian prints to tourists from the Curtis studio. At the age of forty-four, though he had suffered two physical breakdowns, Curtis still had the fire in his belly. At times he felt like the fearless and peripatetic twenty-five-year-old who ran up and down Mount Rainier, a cigarette clenched between his lips, heavy glass plates on his back.
And Curtis had two more things going for him at year’s end: a boat and a fresh plan. The vessel was the Elsie Allen, forty feet long, more than ten feet at the beam, with both a gas engine and sails, a sleek craft built by Skokomish Indians for salmon fishing. Curtis had purchased the boat, cheap, at the end of the Columbia River expedition in 1910, not long after he let his tiny craft go to a watery grave off the Pacific shore. The new boat had proved tough and seaworthy plying the high surf off the Washington coast in that year, where Curtis got to know the continent’s western whaling people, the Makah. And it was just the right size for sailing in and out of the fjords of British Columbia. Curtis was developing an obsession—not unlike his love of the Crow and Hopi—for the coastal tribe up north known as Kwakiutl. The new plan had to do with sailing away on the Elsie Allen, up the Strait of Georgia, to put together a feature-length film. Curtis had traveled with a motion-picture camera since 1906. By 1912, thanks to advances in technology, this fledgling entertainment form had taken off; every American town of any size now had a picture theater. For Curtis, film was a logical next step. When he ducked into a nickelodeon to watch a half-dozen short films, he found himself in a familiar setting—live music and a projection onstage, just like his touring show. Some of the early silent films even had painted negatives, giving a number of their scenes color, though the process was costly and labor intensive. The problem with these silent cinematic bites was length. The Great Train Robbery, produced in 1903, made use of pioneering techniques like cross-cutting and close-ups, but it was only twelve minutes long. The popular films of the first years of the century were mostly primitive westerns—a cowboy aiming his pistol at the camera, causing many in the audience to shriek and duck—or chase films, a thief pursued by cops, or stagy theatrical numbers. By the time Curtis was mulling over his film, multireel picture shows were starting to hit theaters. Using several projectors, the way Curtis had employed a pair of stereopticon portals to put his still images onscreen, filmmakers could show a continuous story lasting almost an hour.
Curtis wanted to film a mythic tale of native people in the days before European contact. He thought the Kwakiutl, with their ornamented war canoes, their striking totem poles and house posts, their large-timbered communal lodges, their hunting prowess off the dangerous Pacific shore, and a history that gave some credence to those who said they once dabbled in headhunting and ritual cannibalism, would be the perfect subject to fill a movie screen. There would be action, drama, love, war, mystery and history, all of it from a world about which Americans knew little. No tribe on the continent had developed more elaborate, artistically detailed masks and costumes of salmon, wolves, turtles, frogs, bears, eagles and ravens. “Their ceremonies are developed to a point which fully justifies the word dramatic,” Curtis wrote.
He would seek to re-create a story of maritime magical realism. Yet it would not be fiction, as he imagined it, but rather “a documentary picture of the Kwakiutl tribes.” This was a novel idea. The newsreel era was still some years away. What passed for reality cinema—called actuality films—were travelogues or boring clips of ships arriving in port or trains pulling out of a station. Curtis would use an all-Indian cast, all Kwakiutl, not a single Italian in face paint on a Hollywood back lot. He would shoot on location. He would make sure that every prop used, every costume worn, was authentic. The artwork, the houses, the totems, the dugout canoes, the masks, the weapons—all would be made by Kwakiutl hands. He would record native music and get musicians to play it. In essence, the film was a grand expansion of his still pictures and written narratives. Most people who heard his outline thought it was brilliant. Curtis had no doubt he could pull it off, though it would involve a new round of begging from fresh donors. But this film business, he insisted, would be a moneymaking proposition, unlike the picture books. Film was the future. Going over the numbers, he thought he would have little trouble making enough on this movie, and several others, to win freedom from debt and get his great work back on track. He organized the Continental Film Company and sent out a prospectus to investors. “The profits to be had from such pictures are quite large,” he wrote, “and exceptionally substantial dividends can be depended upon.” With success, he estimated, the company could make a profit of $100,000 on his first film. And so, with this venture into the new world of motion-picture storytelling, Edward Curtis doubled down: the way to save The North American Indian was to create the world’s first feature-length documentary film.
In British Columbia, Curtis hired a man who lived in both the native and the white realms to be his guide to the Kwakiutl. George Hunt was a chap-faced, sunken-cheeked, foul-tempered son of a Tlingit woman and a Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company drunk. As a boy, he learned to read by copying labels at the trading post. His father beat him for his efforts at literacy, which sent young Hunt to a hideaway in the woods to continue his self-education. When he signed on with Curtis, Hunt was just short of his sixtieth birthday, with a droopy, frost-colored mustache, a freckled bald head and ever-present suspenders holding up his trousers. At first he helped primarily with Volume X. Unlike the previous books, this one would be devoted to a single tribe. Hunt found subjects and settings, and smoothed over disagreements. He was Curtis’s ticket to participate in sea lion hunts and forbidden ceremonies. “Inherently curious and acquisitive, and possessed of an excellent memory,” Curtis said of Hunt. “Our best authority of the Kwakiutl Indians is this man who, without a single day’s schooling, minutely records Indian customs in the native language and translates it word by word into intelligible English.” For the film, he designed sets, contracted actors at 50 cents a day and worked on story lines. Hunt was well qualified for his tasks: he’d married into the Kwakiutl, spoke the language of course, but also understood the needs of outside researchers. For nearly two decades, he had worked for Franz Boas, the German-born Jew considered the father of American anthropology. Their most significant season was a winter with the Kwakiutl—brooding and dark, with ceaseless rain outside, but full of theater and bright storytelling inside—that informed two expansive works Boas published on these people. In addition, Hunt helped to bring a Kwakiutl village to Chicago’s world’s fair in 1892, which gave him a taste of the staging and stereotypes that played best for a big urban audience. In Hunt, Curtis saw traits of Upshaw, his beloved Crow interpreter. He liked Hunt’s feistiness, his ambidextrous qualities on land and sea, his rough edges; in Hunt’s hardscrabble background there also was something of Curtis.
Building on what Boas and Hunt had assembled—and the original information collected on an earlier field trip of Myers’s—Curtis had plenty of written material for his account of Kwakiutl life. The problem was that what most interested him for his film had been outlawed by the Canadian government. Religious ceremonies, masked theater, exchanges of food and goods for the betterment of clan relationships—all were forbidden in Canada by decree in 1884. It was as if British authorities, during the long rule over the Irish in their homeland, had outlawed the Roman Catholic mass or dances built around Celtic songs. At one time, Hunt had been jailed for his role in resuscitating native rituals; he was released only after convincing the government that his actions were anthropological study—science.
At night, over a smoky fire of hissing wet wood, Curtis and Hunt would exchange rants against the government in distant Ottawa. They were particularly upset that it had outlawed the potlatch. Curtis had participated in this great giveaway, practiced by Northwest tribes from the Columbia River to Alaska, after the reburial of Chief Joseph. He knew it well, and he tried to set the record straight in The North American Indian, even correcting the much-respected Boas. The potlatch, said Curtis, was a source of great pride for the giver, rather than an act of greed for the recipient, as some missionaries had portrayed it. The government thought it would bankrupt families. But after participating in the Nez Perce giveaway following Joseph’s death, Curtis believed the potlatch was a way to ensure that riches were always passed around, that tribal wealth never stayed in one clan. In this belief he echoed the sentiments of Maquinna, the powerful Nootka chief, who compared the potlatch to a white man’s bank, saying, “When we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good.”
At the risk of imprisonment, Hunt went to work organizing a potlatch and other banned ceremonies for the film. Curtis also ordered him to collect skulls, angering some elders, in order to re-create what the ancient Kwakiutl did with the heads of rivals. This gave Curtis his movie’s title, with more than a nod at the popular market: In the Land of the Head-Hunters. To make film history, he would have to break the law.
With the picture opera tour at an end, and Hunt’s advance work under way in the north, Curtis returned to settle his personal affairs in Seattle. He rested, sleep coming much easier in the long night of the Northwest’s early winter. He renewed his work at the studio, catching up with some of the latest techniques in luminescent black-and-white printing being developed by Muhr, his wizard of the darkroom. Raising money for the new medium of film, he found, was not going to be nearly as difficult as selling subscriptions for the books. And then word came on December 11, 1912, of a personal loss: his mother, Ellen Sherriff Curtis, died at the home of her other Seattle son, Asahel. It was not unexpected; she was sixty-eight and had been ill. Young Ed Curtis had been the breadwinner for his mother in Wisconsin starting at the age of fourteen, and later at the Puget Sound homestead. After his studio became a success, he had moved her into his own crowded home in Seattle. But over the past decade, the famous son was never around, and she grew closer to Asahel. At the funeral, in the chapel at Butterworth & Sons in downtown Seattle, and at the burial at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the two brothers did not speak to each other.
Curtis moved to New York for the winter of 1913 to manage what had become a much more complicated enterprise under a board of directors. While fund-raising for the film, he’d stopped soliciting subscriptions for The North American Indian, much to the dismay of his overseers. They were in the midst of deciding how to resolve his debts when, on the last day of March, a Marconi wireless carried news of global impact from overseas: J. P. Morgan had died in Rome, at the age of seventy-five. After traveling to Egypt with his daughter and son-in-law, Morgan had suffered a series of small strokes, and then a much larger one. In Rome he took an eight-room suite at the Grand Hotel and tried to recover. Morgan turned the heat up in his quarters and refused to eat, though he sucked on a lit cigar. As word had leaked about his condition, the financial markets turned shaky. There was little the doctors could do but sedate him with morphine. On the day of his death, his temperature shot up to 104.5 degrees, and he faded in and out of consciousness. The titan’s body was taken by train to Paris, and then by ship to New York. Select mourners were allowed to view his casket at the Morgan Library. On the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange was closed until noon in his honor, and a parade of prominent capitalists walked past five thousand roses at the service in St. George’s Church.
“My heart and life are broken,” said Belle da Costa Greene.
She would be even more devastated after Morgan’s will was read. His estate, valued at about $80 million, was not nearly as great as had been speculated. Morgan had put most of his money into art, much of it housed in his library at Thirty-sixth and Madison. His collections were worth perhaps three times as much as the liquid assets in the will. After leaving multimillion-dollar trusts for his daughters, millions more for friends, charities and causes, he designated $3 million outright and the bulk of his fortune in stocks, bonds and property to his son, Jack. That included the library. Belle Greene was given $50,000 (just under $1 million today). The will stipulated that she be kept on in her current position.
To Curtis, the death meant more than the loss of a patron who had given wings to his work, the only rich man who stuck with him. Morgan as Medici also gave him freedom: he never told Curtis what to write or how to print a portrait. He never urged him to hold back on Custer, or bite his tongue when he lashed out at the government. His name was on the checks and on the title page of every volume to date, with a gracious credit.
Within days of the old man’s funeral, Jack Morgan signaled a change in direction. Art purchases that had been in the works were frozen, along with other commitments. When Curtis asked Belle Greene to lobby on his behalf, she informed him that Jack Morgan’s auditors were going over the books and were concerned about expenses run up by The North American Indian.
Curtis wrote a long missive to Greene in his defense. The problem was not too much money spent, he said, but too little. J. P. Morgan’s backing had been an excuse for other rich people to decline. He was extremely grateful, mind you, but “the attitude of letting Mr. Morgan do it has been difficult to overcome.” Back in 1906, total costs were projected at $1.5 million. Morgan had contributed an initial $75,000, leaving Curtis to raise more than $1.4 million from subscriptions. If he secured 100 subscriptions a year, in five years he would reach the goal. But he was averaging only 23 a year. More than the money, the work had at times strained him to the breaking point. The North American Indian was not “a pamphlet at six bits,” he raged, but “a real piece of investigation” and “a real book.” The House of Morgan was lucky to have a man of his fortitude. “Few men have been so fortunate as to possess the physical strength I have put in this; and year in and year out I have given to the very maximum of my physical and mental endurance in my effort to make the work a worthy one.”
He closed with a wish to see Belle in person, perhaps socially. She let him know that it was not possible just now to meet face-to-face. As for the future, everything was under review—including the library itself. They would have to wait, both of them, to see what Jack Morgan had in mind for their fate.