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Walpi Maidens—Hopi, 1906. The young women wore their hair in squash blossom whorls.
THE CALIFORNIA OF THE 1920s was perhaps the most fertile place on earth to grow a life. In a state the size of Italy, with a climate often compared to a soft caress, lived barely three million people—and most of them in two urban clusters, around the splendid San Francisco Bay and in the semidesert strip of Mediterranean idyll in the south. The natural nursery of heavy winter rains and river-delivered black soil meant an abundance of earthly riches: cloud-busting redwoods in the north, billowy copses of wild oak in the foothills east of the bay, prickly pear cacti and spike-flowered yuccas in the south. It was all elbow room and opportunity in the sunshine, unless your family had lived there for centuries and centuries. For in the California of the 1920s it was easier to find fake Indians in Hollywood than real ones in the land of their ancestors. When the Spanish sent missionaries in the 1700s, Indians numbered about 300,000 in the state. They lived in extended clans, grouped into more than a hundred distinct tribes, none very big. They were sustained by acorns and game in the Napa Valley, salmon and berries around the Golden Gate, deer and roots in the Central Valley. In manner and outlook, they were as varied as the terrain. By 1848, when the American flag replaced those of Spain, Russia, Mexico and the Bear Flag Republic, the Indian population was about 100,000. Over the next ten years, a tide of swift mortality wiped out 70,000 natives. What remained of the first residents of California scattered to isolated pockets of the state. The elimination—an indirect biological war—had been so systematic and complete that in 1911, newspapers around the world trumpeted a major discovery: an Indian named Ishi was found near the slopes of Mount Lassen. The last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, he was brought to the University of California at Berkeley for study and probing, a living exhibit. Ishi was short, tangle-haired and middle-aged, and spoke a language no one could understand. His name meant “man” in the Yana dialect, and he was heralded as the last “primitive” Indian in the state.
For Edward Curtis, looking to revive a life work that had been largely dormant for much of the previous eight years, California was a challenge. Even the most knowledgeable anthropologist, aided by a network of native insiders, would be hard-pressed to find remnants of the old life. How to present a culture when only a few scraps existed? Myers had been working California since the team finished with the Kwakiutl in 1914, collecting field notes, conducting interviews, checking facts with scholars. Start in the north, he advised Curtis: go to the mountains, the tangle of vines and old-growth trees. The Indians of California were as hidden as the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Curtis packed a tent, a cot, a bedroll, clothes, a Coleman stove, pots and pans, several cameras, a recording device, reference books and food into a Chevrolet coupe and headed upstate from Los Angeles. He drove through the Central Valley, following the San Joaquin River and then the big artery of the Sacramento before veering northwest toward the volcano of Mount Shasta and the folds of mountain ranges in the Trinity and Klamath wilderness areas. Getting out of the city and back under an open sky did wonders for his mildewed spirit. And there was an added lift: in the tiny town of Williams, just outside Mendocino National Forest, an easygoing, conversational twenty-three-year-old woman stepped off a train from Seattle and fell into the arms of her father. Florence Curtis wanted to connect with her dad as an assistant in the field. Her hair was cut short for the summer, a bob. At fifty-four, Curtis had grayed considerably since “Flo” last saw him, and had lost most of his hair on top, which he covered with an ever-present cap. The Vandyke beard, his trademark since the 1890s, remained. He walked with a noticeable limp, and told Florence it was from an encounter with a whale while filming the Kwakiutl—the leviathan’s tail had whacked Curtis, severely limiting his mobility. This tale of the tail was just that; the whale, of course, had been purchased dead and towed to the film site. But why attribute a slowing of the great man to the boring grind of age when an adventure in Indian country would add to his legend? If Curtis had begun to embellish his life, Florence did not hold it against him. She found her father a delight—“brawny and brave,” she said later, but also “a gentle, sensitive man.”
Clara was out of Edward’s life, except for missives from her lawyers complaining about tardy alimony payments. He was kept afloat emotionally by the two daughters who worshiped him and a son who wanted to move back west. Beth was twenty-seven and married now to a portrait photographer named Manford Magnuson—a likable addition to the Curtis family. She ran the studio in Los Angeles and spoke for her father on many an occasion, in letter form or on the phone.
The studio and Hollywood work had finally generated some needed money to get Curtis out with the Indians. He’d been putting a few dollars aside in those gray years as well, from royalties of a little children’s book he’d published in 1915 and continued to sell, Indian Days of the Long Ago. All of this gave him just enough to buy a long furlough away from Hollywood. In Seattle, he was a man from another era, and a subject of dark rumors inside the Rainier Club, where some of his best pictures—magnificently finished and framed—now covered many walls. In Los Angeles he was a minor appendage to a star-making factory. But the closer he got to Indian country, the more Curtis felt like his old self—an aging zephyr, on the move again in search of American originals. With a measure of dignity restored, Curtis felt strong enough to renew a correspondence with an old friend.
“I am certain you will be glad to know that I am in the field working with Indians,” he wrote Meany in the summer of 1922, the first letter in seven months. “I am out on a three or four month trip with the Indians of northern California . . . Florence is with me. Other than that, I am alone.”
Curtis had emerged from his bleak hibernation earlier that year with a characteristic burst, rousing himself for a sizable achievement in producing Volume XII. This publication was devoted entirely to the Hopi, the second time he had given over all of one work to a single tribe. Jack Morgan paid for the printing, after being nagged by testy subscribers who had not seen anything new from the Shadow Catcher since 1916. The Hopi volume was brilliant, Curtis at the top of his form, the book stuffed with some of his best images collected over a twenty-year period. He had spent seven seasons with the tribe, more than any other, though his last trip, in 1919, was a disappointment. The grim wheels of modernity, which had rolled over the mesas of central Arizona ten years earlier, had left their tracks everywhere. As a result, book twelve was a history more than a contemporary snapshot. But what a story in graphic form. His pictures had that intimacy again, devoid of subject-and-photographer awkwardness. In shots of unwed girls of the Hopi Nation, with their hair tied in those squash blossom whorls that marked their virginity and looked like giant mouse ears, you can almost hear the giggling. In a picture titled Afternoon Chat, some of the women cover their mouths in amusement. A crowded still life, On the Housetop, is a village scene that explains many facets of Hopi living—the kiva entrance, the ladder to the upper rooms, a baking area where piki bread is prepared, an outdoor oven. And perched around the village like birds on a tree limb are women with black-and-white shawls, their hair wound as tight as a lollipop. Whether in close-ups, like the picture of a child awaiting the return of the snake dancers, or in one showing a Hopi man with straight bangs and early frown lines, or in the long shots that feature architecture and building styles, Curtis offered the most detailed representation of a single tribe ever committed to film.
In the text, cowritten by Myers, it’s clear how much of a hold the tribe had on Curtis. “There is a subtle charm about the Hopi and their high-perched homes that has made the work particularly delightful . . . Numerically weak, poor in worldly goods, physically small, they possess true moral courage.” The setting was sublime. “The incredible blueness of the sky and brilliance of the stars take hold of the heart and call one back again and again.” He detailed an ancient life on eight pueblos carved into the tops of mesas. He told how they had been able to fight off Christianity for nearly four hundred years; only in recent times had a faction of the tribe succumbed to missionaries. He lamented that “a futile decree that Hopi must wear their hair short” and the “blundering interference in harmless religious and personal customs” had resulted in “a gradual abandonment of the old order.” In expressing such a sentiment, Curtis was speaking for himself as much as the Hopi. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded of this enchanted bit of high-desert ground, “There is a rather disheartening air of newness.”
In California, the Curtis pair pressed the wobbly wheeled Chevy over the high passes around Mount Shasta and ducked into dark forests on the west slope, aiming for hamlets of aboriginal life along the rivers that fell away toward the coast. Most of the area was roadless, a remnant of continental America that had been largely untouched by the tide of humanity then filling other empty spaces on the map. While San Francisco County had a population of 500,000, a few hundred miles north, Trinity County numbered only 2,500 people in its two-million-acre expanse, and not a single incorporated city. Curtis named his car Nanny, for its goatlike prowess at clinging to precipitous vertical sides and leading them onward, upward, downward.
Florence was astonished at her father’s pace and his skill in the outdoors. He seemed to know every bird and fish, the name of every flower and fir and deciduous tree along the way. He sensed a coming storm by cloud formations and wind, and remained strangely calm when it looked as if they were lost. In the evening, he put up camp quickly, though it did not look like a hastily thrown-together resting spot. He insisted that the tent always be placed in the finest setting, for the view. In the morning, when Florence awoke, he had coffee brewing and cheese omelets on the Coleman stove. He tried to procure fresh fish at the close of a day. For those dinners, Curtis expertly filleted the salmon and grilled it, skin side against the fire, as the Indians did, and as Curtis had done on the Columbia. He liked his vegetables barely cooked, to keep the flavor intact, and he always brought enough ingredients to toss a salad with Roquefort dressing, the recipe that had dazzled the Roosevelt family. Dessert was poached pears or other fresh fruit, slightly caramelized. All of this was camping fare, done without a kitchen. For sleeping, he weaved spruce boughs into a cushiony bed, “a work of art, and so comfortable,” as Florence remembered.
Watching him assemble the set pieces of his life work, Florence was in awe of the one-man North American Indian project. She had seen him at work in Canyon de Chelly among the Navajo, dashing between thunderstorms, experimenting with exposures by closing and opening the flap of a tent that served as a portable studio, cutting deals in native shorthand. At the time, she was a girl of seven and could not appreciate his skills in the rugged world he inhabited outside Seattle. As an adult, Florence was amazed at how they would arrive in a strange village and, by day’s close, have people posing for him. One rainy afternoon looked like it would end with nothing to show. But Curtis found a teenage girl living along the Smith River. He offered her a silver dollar if she would dress up in a cloak of her family’s making and pose on a bluff against a metallic sky. The Tolowa woman was photographed in a bejeweled deerskin kilt, her face in profile. Curtis used a 6½-by-8½-inch camera for this work, the lens expanding out like an accordion, and durable for the bouncing ride of Nanny.
Another time, they camped not far from Ukiah, where Indians labored in the bean fields. The day had been hot, near 100 degrees in Flo’s telling. Curtis and daughter were just settling down with the dip of the sun when an Indian girl ran into camp, breathless. She explained that her grandmother had been picking beans in the heat and now seemed dizzy, sick. Curtis must come at once. He fired up the coupe and followed the girl’s directions to the Indian settlement. Inside a small lean-to he found a woman who appeared very ill. Florence urged her father to get a doctor.
“That’s for them to decide.”
Curtis did in fact summon a doctor, but not one with a degree. A medicine man who had been hired by Curtis as a translator arrived with herbal remedies and went to work on the old woman. Curtis and Flo returned to their own camp. The next day, the girl came back with news: her grandmother was much better. “Our medicine man knew what to do.” What surprised Florence was that her father had enough faith in the Indians to heal themselves without outside help.
They crossed the coastal mountains, driving east to west, then west to east, in a dizzying zigzag, six times that summer. Nanny held up, but for one hiccup. On a mountain road carved into the red soil of the Klamath range, Curtis veered off to the side, the way narrowing without warning. His car was forced to the edge, where there was no more level ground to hold them. The coupe slipped, slouching toward a deep gorge. Curtis bit on the cigarette in his mouth and gunned the engine; it was just enough to move the car a few more feet, avoiding a free fall. But still, in the tug of gravity, the car leaned, fell on its side and started to tumble. The chasm yawned several hundred feet down. By some miracle the car came to rest on a hardy oak anchored to the mountainside. The tree saved them from certain death, they both recalled, though Curtis credited his driving skill.
“Once in a lifetime one uses good judgment in what seems to be the last moment of existence,” he wrote in a long and passionate letter to Meany. “This was one of the times.” After the car came to a stop against the tree, Curtis looked below. “Sitting in the seat, I could have tossed my still burning cigarette two hundred feet down to the first ledge of the gorge.”
Shortly thereafter, he traded wheels for paddles. They arrived on the shore of the swift Klamath River, a gnarly old stream that drained a land where pre-glacial-age forests of northern California mingled with the newer evergreen terrain of the Pacific Northwest. Hiring two Indian guides, Curtis and daughter moved upriver, negotiating the riffles and tugs of the Klamath, great fun for Florence. Once, she caught sight of her father’s face in a moment of uncluttered joy—an image that stayed with her for years.
The trip paid off with some of his most memorable work from California: Indians spearing and catching trout in weirs, harvesting water lilies in late summer light, making huts out of tule reeds. At times, Florence and her old man found a pool of water that was utterly still, providing Curtis the mirror he so loved for reflecting a subject on a rock perch. This kind of framing presented a people inseparable from an unspoiled world—just as Curtis had outlined in 1905. If, back at the government food clinic in town, an image of short-haired men in overalls lining up for powdered milk was more representative of modern Indian life, Curtis wasn’t interested. Would an Irishman in a hamlet on the Dingle Peninsula prefer to be shown trailing sheep or getting a care package from America? The question answered itself. Curtis was a documentarian only of a certain kind of life.
In southern Oregon, they chugged up to the rim of Crater Lake, the ancient, lopped-off volcano that was filled with centuries of Cascade runoff, the surface holding a big sky at midday. As John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had discovered when they camped on the crater’s edge, one of the deepest lakes in the world made visitors stop in their tracks. Curtis also liked the big, sweet-scented ponderosa pines with their jigsaw puzzle bark. He photographed a Klamath chief looking out at the great bowl of the lake. It was good stuff, this late-summer work, enough to make for some dramatic highlights in Volumes XIII and XIV. The first book would cover the Hupa, the Yurok, the Karok, the Wiyot, the Tolawa, the Tututni, the Shasta, the Achomawi and the Klamath. The next would include the Kato, the Wailaki, the Yuki, the Pomo, the Wintun, the Maidu, the Miwok and the Yokut. He delighted in the details he’d discovered: how the scarlet scalp of a pileated woodpecker was used as the showpiece atop the heads of Hupa dancers, or the explanation for why the Yurok people would not talk to dogs—they were afraid the dogs would talk back.
But as he gathered oral histories, building on the work of Myers and studies that had been written earlier, Curtis could not contain his disgust at the epic of torture these natives had endured—starved, sickened, raped, betrayed, run down, humiliated.
“While practically all Indians suffered seriously at the hands of the settlers and the government, the Indians of this state suffered beyond comparison,” he wrote Meany from California. “The principal outdoor sport of the settlers during the 50s and 60s seemingly was the killing of Indians. There is nothing else in the history of the United States which approaches the inhuman and brutal treatment of the California tribes. Men desiring women merely went to the village or camp, killed the men and took such women as they desired . . . Camps were raided for men to serve as laborers. Such Indian workers were worse than slaves. The food furnished them being so poor and scanty that they died of hunger.” He finished with an account of treaties broken after gold was found on Indian land. “Thus the Indians became a people without even camping places which they could call their own. No story can ever be written which can overstate the inhuman treatment accorded the California tribes.”
This castigation of his countrymen was not just for Meany’s eyes. A very similar vent was opened in Volume XIII. As he emerged from his blue period, Curtis became ever more outspoken. Though they had fought in the Great War, and before that made up a unit of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, Indians still were not citizens in the country some had died for. Tribal holdings continued to shrink, from 138 million acres in Indian hands in 1890 to barely 50 million in the 1920s. Assimilation was the unquestioned policy. Reservations were to be sliced into pieces and sold. Tribal links were considered anachronistic, the customs and rituals barbaric. Indians would blend and fade into the carpet of twentieth-century America until they were no longer identifiable as a people apart, until they looked and talked and worked like everyone else.
In 1923, Curtis helped to found the Indian Welfare League, taking up a political cause—with artists, museum curators and lawyers, based mostly in southern California—for one of the few times in his life. The group was formed to find work and legal services for the tribes, and got heavily involved in the issue of Indian citizenship. But as a one-sided crusader, Curtis often strayed from the script, neither weak-hearted liberal nor hard-nosed realist. His campaign was a mix of tough love for Indians and scorn for Washington experts. In a speech in Santa Fe, he said Indians must stop feeling sorry for themselves. “Self-pity is absolutely fatal,” he proclaimed. “It is worse than dope.”
At one extreme were government censors and know-nothings, choking the life from native culture and trying to wash the Indian identity from the people. In Curtis’s view, these agents of authority should occupy a special place in hell, alongside missionaries. At the other end, Curtis had no tolerance for people who believed Indians could do anything they wanted to so long as it was considered “traditional.” He was particularly upset that men in some of New Mexico’s tribes had sex with young girls because it was somehow tied up in ritual. Curtis knew that people thought he cared only for “the old Indian, with no interest whatsoever in the economic welfare of the Indian, his education, his future,” as he said in Santa Fe. In fact, his work to immortalize the Indian past informed his campaign for the Indian future. That initiative paid off in 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizen Act, making native people full stakeholders in the republic. The tribes with treaties, signed by presidents and passed by Congress, would remain sovereign—nations within a nation, in the words that came to define the relationship.
The same year saw publication of the two latest editions of The North American Indian, the volumes from work in northern California, Oregon and Nevada. In recording, translating and passing along the words in numerous tribal tongues, Curtis noted that more languages were spoken on the West Coast of the United States than in all of Europe. In recounting the near genocide of the first nations of the Golden State, Curtis was blunt: “The conditions are still so acute that, after spending many months among these scattered groups of Indians, the author finds it difficult even to mention the subject with calmness.” Reviews of the new books were practically nonexistent. Americans, in the frothy fever of the Jazz Age, had little interest in Indian pictures. And Curtis? Is he still with us? There was no mention of him in the papers, even after the towering achievement of the Hopi volume. Meany tried to cheer his friend: Curtis was six books from the finish line, and should never give up so long as he could draw a breath.
“About the only thing my friends can do is hold a little belief in me,” Curtis replied. “I am working hard and trying to justify such faith as my friends may have. The problems are many, however the real work moves on.”
The real work then went into high gear, almost matching the pace of Curtis’s early years. He and Myers spent the fall of 1924 in the Land of Enchantment, among the pueblos of the Rio Grande, all the way up to Taos. As the Spanish had interbred with many of these tribes, by conquest and settlement, some of the faces looked vaguely European, though Curtis found plenty of fascinating material for his camera. He took issue with some of the earlier conclusions about these people published by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, the anthropologist who spent years in New Mexico under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian. And she took issue with him. “Mr. E. S. Curtis declared to me that to reach the inner life of the Indian one must have his pocket book overflowing until the money runs out in a stream upon the ground,” she once said, in reference to the days when Curtis was flush with Morgan money. Were he a credentialed scientist, she said, this would have bothered her greatly. But because he was an artist, she eventually gave him her full support. “Mr. Curtis’s work is beautiful as it is.” Of course, Curtis always wanted to be known for much more than beauty. Writing Hodge, he and Myers were almost breathless in reporting that, once again, they would be correcting the record; much of what was in textbooks about Acoma, Taos and other communities of New Mexico was simply wrong. This work would fill volumes XVI and XVII.
The next year, 1925, Curtis made a rare business trip to New York. Where once he had crisscrossed the country routinely, he now did so only for the most pressing concerns. Jack Morgan had agreed to see The North American Indian through to the end. The House of Morgan was now more than a quarter million dollars into their Indian photographer. Still, its portion covered barely a fourth of Curtis’s expenses. This final investment would come with a steep price: Morgan raised the issue of transferring the Curtis copyright to him. More than a decade earlier, Curtis had lost business control over the project itself when it was turned over to Morgan’s bankers. He had also given up all rights to his movie in 1924, part of a scramble for desperation cash. But he still held the copyright to the plates and negatives of The North American Indian. With his latest investment in Curtis, Morgan expected something in return. It was not a charity they were running. Negotiations would continue.
Curtis headed for the northern plains in the summer of 1925, meeting Myers in Montana. From there, they crossed the Canadian border into Alberta, with its lacerating winds and oceans of grass. The tribes were spread over an enormous expanse of tableland at the foot of the Rockies. Reaching them, getting their stories and taking their pictures, was akin to going into an area the size of Germany and looking for a handful of old ethnic-Polish families.
Curtis and Myers traveled to Calgary and then spread out in search of Sarsi and Cree. It helped tremendously that Curtis had so much prior knowledge from his days with Bird Grinnell among the Blackfeet and Piegan. The Alberta natives depended on caribou, as the Plains Indians to the south relied on buffalo. They were nomadic, following food sources, living most of the year in tipis. The pictures that Curtis took are stark, stripped of artifice. He framed wind-sanded faces and silhouetted men on the bare backs of ponies. He shot Cree picking blueberries and Chipewyan pitching tents in aspen groves. As usual, Myers worked the written narrative. “We were lucky to find a very good source of information for the Cree and Chipewyan, and pumped it dry,” Myers wrote Hodge. This work filled Volume XVIII.
The following year, 1926, would be given over to field research for the final book on Indians in the contiguous United States—the tricky task of finding intact indigenous communities in the state of Oklahoma. Then the work would close out, in Volume XX, with people of the far north. Oklahoma was a dumping ground for tribes from all over the country, with reservation boundaries that were as erasable as letters on a crossword puzzle. To Curtis, it was the place where native ways went to die. The name itself is a combination of two Choctaw words—okla, which means “people,” and humma, the word for “red.” Nearly a fourth of all Indians in the United States lived there, as Curtis noted. But very few had been in Oklahoma for long, or by choice. What to do, for example, with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that had been marched from the South and settled in Oklahoma?
Curtis would concentrate on the once fearful Comanche (known as the Lords of the Plains), the Wichita, the Southern Cheyenne and the Oto. He told Myers to be in Oklahoma on May 1, the date of an intertribal gathering. But Myers, a year shy of his fiftieth birthday, had started to drag. He was married, with a business proposition awaiting him in California, and had promised his wife a much-delayed trip to Europe. For days on end he agonized before he penned a painful letter to his boss and partner: “It is an unpleasant thing to have to write you that I shall not be able to do any field work this summer. An opportunity has presented itself to make a lot of money in the next two or three years—a real estate transaction. It is one of the kind that rarely occur, and I am getting too old to pass it up in hope that another will be at hand when the Indian work is finished.”
Myers, like Hodge in New York, had been working for minimal compensation, laboring through the 1920s to help Curtis finish The North American Indian. But at least Hodge had a steady paycheck from his job at the museum. Myers had nothing to fall back on. The country had gone on an economic tear in the giddy years after the war, the stock market doubling, tripling, commodity prices doing the same thing, real estate that had warranted barely a glance now shingled in gold. Middle-aged, with nothing to show for giving his best years to Ed Curtis, Myers felt he had to leap at a chance to make a deal or two that would set him up for his old age. He had moved to San Francisco with his wife, and using her money, he had bought a building. The plan was to renovate it and then sell it for a large profit. But the project would be time-consuming, leaving little room for anything else. He had no choice but to quit The North American Indian. “As you probably know, the desire to finish the job is what has kept me at it these last few years on a salary that doesn’t amount to much in these times,” he concluded, “and only a very remarkable chance could have induced me to drop the plowhandle.”
Having lost Muhr, his photo-finisher, Morgan, his patron, and Upshaw, his translator; having had Phillips, his field stenographer, and Schwinke, his cameraman, go off to other callings, Curtis counted on Myers as a brother in The Cause. Myers was his second self, his ghost in the writing, his chief ethnologist, journalist, editor and wordsmith combined, the only person alive who knew the work as well as Curtis, who bled the project. What’s more, he and Curtis truly got along. After almost twenty years together, “we never had a word of discord,” Curtis wrote. The North American Indian, with its exhaustive accounts of languages, customs and histories that had never been fully recorded, might never have existed without Myers. Not only was his work ethic extraordinary, matching Curtis in long hours, but his temperament was suited to the thankless task. He rarely complained. But it was all over now.
“Like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky” was how Curtis described the news to Hodge.
He paid tribute to his partner in the introduction to Volume XVIII, the last book to which Myers contributed. “In the field research covering many years, including that of which the present volume is the result, I have had the valued assistance of Mr. W. E. Myers, and it is my misfortune that he has been compelled to withdraw from the work, owing to other demands, after so long a period of harmonious relations and with the single purpose of making these volumes worthy of the subject and of their patrons,” Curtis wrote. “His service during that time has been able, faithful, and self-sacrificing, often in the face of adverse conditions, hardship, and discouragement. It is with deep regret to both of us that he has found it impossible to continue the collaboration to the end.” Myers wept when he read the dedication.
The new kid was just out of the University of Pennsylvania, a native of Vermont. Did he know anything about the West? About Indians? About ethnology? Not much, as it turned out, but Stewart Eastwood had taken some anthropology classes and had come highly recommended by an authority on “Eastern Woodland Indians,” as his résumé said. Eastern Woodland Indians? Who the hell were they?
Curtis had tried to lure Hodge out of the office to take up the final fieldwork with him, knowing he liked to flee the city, particularly for trips to the Southwest. But Hodge had a full schedule at the museum, so he vetted the Ivy League kid and sent him out to Oklahoma to meet the Shadow Catcher. It was a rough go. Eastwood joined Curtis at a large intertribal gathering in the flat light of Oklahoma. They spent weeks working sources, looking for faces to shoot, stories to tell. It was depressing. “The program is tentative,” Eastwood reported back to Hodge, “we are up in the air since so many problems have arisen . . . The five civilized tribes are so much civilized, so white, that they will be impossible while the wealthy Osage are not only becoming civilized but wealth gives them a haughtiness difficult to overcome.” It was a problem, this business of civilized tribes and tribes grown rich from oil discoveries on tribal land. Curtis noted that “idle wealth” was like a disease among the Osage; the men were chauffeured around in new cars, while the women—in an ironic twist—employed poor whites as their housekeepers.
The Wichita were another kind of problem. Mormon and Baptist missionaries had been all over them, and as a result, many tribal customs were now banned as pagan rituals. Their practice could mean a sentence to hell. “Couldn’t even take a picture of one of their grass houses,” Eastwood complained. (Curtis eventually managed to shoot that very image, titled Grass House—Wichita, for Volume XIX.) Tribe after tribe, it was the same story—no story. The past had not only been banished but wiped away, no trace of it in this new land. The urgency of his work over nearly a third of a century, always in a hurry to stay one step ahead of “civilization,” was never more justified than in Oklahoma. There, Curtis saw his worst fear; it was why he’d lamented, time and again, that with each passing month “some old patriarch dies and with him goes a store of knowledge and there is nothing to take its place.”
No tribe in the country had fallen so far as the Comanche. Once, as masters of an enormous swath of flatland, they had forced Texans to retreat behind settlement lines and Mexicans to run at the sight of them. Indians from other tribes would slit their own throats before allowing themselves to be taken prisoner by a Comanche. There were no better buffalo hunters, nor more efficient warriors, than this tribe. They reveled in scalping and torture of enemies, particularly fellow Indians without battle skills. Their raids for wives and horses were legendary, going after the Apache, the helpless Five Civilized Tribes and assorted natives up and down the Rio Grande and north into Kansas and Colorado. All of it was carried out with an exuberant “blood lust,” as Curtis wrote. The sight of the Comanche now, forced into stoop labor, raising chickens on a reservation in Caddo County, Oklahoma, was pathetic to Curtis. “The old wrinkled men,” he wrote, “sit about and tell of the days of their ancestors when life was real and full of action.” The best he could do was to concentrate on portraits. Only in the faces could Curtis find some hint of the authentic. He did not care if they appeared before his camera in starched shirt and tie; what fear the Comanche still struck in the hearts of others would have to emanate from a glare that carried a sense of menace from their grandparents.
The text was a struggle from start to finish. Hodge judged it an inferior work and asked for a major rewrite. He complained to Eastwood about his spelling, accuracy, sentence structure and the paucity of new information. It was a mess. They clearly needed Myers’s hand. And Myers himself was sorry that the work had suffered so much from his departure, feeling author’s remorse. “I am distressed by your report on vol. 19,” he wrote Hodge, “it really causes me regret that I yielded to the lure of Mammon.” By early 1927, after hammering away at Eastwood, Curtis felt the kid was improving, though he was not holding up well to the withering critiques from Hodge. Eastwood threatened to quit.
“You’re a good editor but a bum diplomat,” Curtis wrote Hodge. “It has taken a lot of quick figuring and hard talking to keep the boy in line. To have him drop out at this last moment would wreck the ship.” Hodge insisted they keep their standards high this close to the end. “There is no need of being thin-skinned in a work of this kind. The manuscript is either right or wrong, and if wrong should be righted.” The writers went back to their notes, but it was hard to find water when the well was dry. As they closed out the editing, Curtis conceded that Volume XIX probably would not stand among the rest. Time had robbed him of the chance to find the pulsing heart of Indian life in the state with more Indians than any other.
“You say the Comanche material is inadequate,” he wrote Hodge in a testy exchange. “I grant you that it does not make a strong showing, but one cannot make something from nothing . . . The only material we could find was countless, meaningless, fragmentary obscene stories of the camp fire type.”
There remained one chance for redemption: to finish on a high note in the far north. Alaska had held a special place in Curtis’s heart ever since his sea journey there with the Harriman expedition of 1899. He was thirty-one then, still on the boyish side of manhood. The gimpy-legged graybeard of 1927 who made plans for the final field trip of The North American Indian was broke, divorced, a year shy of his sixtieth birthday. He had a lifelong nicotine addiction and the smoker’s hack to go with it, as well as assorted grumpy complaints about his bad fortune at this stage of life. And yet in one respect he moved as he always did: confident in motion itself as the animating virtue of his existence. Beth would finance the trip with money from the studio and from her husband, Manford Magnuson, whose own portrait photography business was doing well. The latest home of the Curtis studio was the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, which gave it a glamorous address for the stationery and was a prime spot for tourist traffic. Visitors from the East or from Europe needed to go no further than the lobby of their downtown hotel to purchase a Curtis Indian, the kind of picture that would generate stories back home and become an heirloom in time.
The new plan was to sail from Seattle to Nome, a fogbound seaport in Alaska Territory, ice-free only a few months of the year, within easy distance of the Arctic Circle. From Nome they would branch out to the Bering Sea, to islands and cliffs, in search of Eskimo people, all the way to the Siberian shore. They could work sixteen-hour days in the midnight sun, Curtis reasoned, and stretch the season out until the first snows of September. “Good fortune being with us we may, by working under great pressure, manage to finish the task in one season,” Curtis wrote. The college kid, Eastwood, signed on for a second go-round despite his difficult rookie outing in Oklahoma. The joy for Curtis was the first assistant, his daughter Beth. For much of her life she had dreamed of spending time in the wild with her father. Florence had gotten to experience him in action in California. Now it was Beth’s turn. When Myers heard of the final launch of The North American Indian, he was sick with regret, killing time in San Francisco, his real estate deal yet to come together.
“Curtis writes me that he is leaving for Alaska,” Myers told Hodge. “I wish I were going.”
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