IN THE SUMMER OF 1948, the Seattle Historical Society asked a retired librarian named Harriet Leitch to assess a set of books that had just been donated by a wealthy widow, Sophie Frye Bass. The history buffs were not sure of their value, or what to make of them. The acquisition was not a complete set, just eight volumes. Still, they were luminous, these large-format books and folios of silky vellum, the pictures bringing their Indian subjects to life.
For Leitch, it was like finding the Seven Cities of Cibola. A beloved figure, once voted Librarian of the Year by her colleagues, she had certainly heard about The North American Indian, though sightings were rare. There were perhaps only five of the fully bound twenty-volume sets in Seattle. One was at the city’s main library, another at the University of Washington, residing at last in its logical home after Professor Meany’s ceaseless work to convince the school of its merit. A third was listed as belonging to Colonel Alden Blethen, the Seattle Times publisher who had died more than three decades earlier. A fourth was held by the Stimson family, who’d made a fortune in timber and was now building a broadcast empire. And the eccentric railroad man Samuel Hill was a subscriber during his time in Seattle.
As Leitch ran her fingers over the fine photogravures, the handset letterpress text printed on heavy stock, the leather binding and gilt edging, and gazed into the eyes of people who looked as if they sprang from some musty American storage chest, she wondered what had become of the architect of this exquisite construction of biblio-art. The last entry in the Seattle Public Library’s clipping file was from 1927, when Curtis was jailed and hauled before a judge. The family had disappeared. No one was left in the region. She found a contact for Beth, who was still running a Curtis studio on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Leitch wrote and explained her current task, with a few basic queries:
Is Edward S. Curtis still alive?
If so, could he answer some questions by correspondence?
What had become of The North American Indian?
Married for more than twenty years, Beth was selling prints of Curtis Indians, supplementing her husband’s work as a portrait photographer. Her father resided not far from the studio, in a small apartment on Saturn Street. The address, just a few blocks from Beverly Hills, belied his living conditions: Curtis hated the place. It was confining, in a neighborhood crawling with poseurs and choked by bad air. Whenever he stepped outside, he gasped at the yellow smog; some days it was so bad he could not see the few miles to Hollywood Hills. At eighty, his hands were bent and gnarled by arthritis, he could barely walk, and he was going blind. Despite all of that, he felt fairly spry, a late-life vigor that he attributed to herbal tea from a plant in Oregon that he’d been drinking for years. And, in an effort to hold on to his eyesight, he ate a pound of carrots every day.
“Mr. Curtis is elderly,” Beth wrote Leitch in late August, “but very much alive. I know he would be delighted to give you any information you might like concerning his life.”
For a librarian, accustomed to dealing with voices from a muted assemblage of filed books, this news was a jolt of discovery, on par with leafing through The North American Indian for the first time. She wrote Curtis immediately, and thereafter kept up a string of inquiries. In her first letter, she explained how the eight volumes had come into the hands of the historical society, and she seemed somewhat embarrassed to admit that few people knew of their significance. Though, of course, she was not one of them. “It seems to me that your important and valuable work should be brought to the attention of the present residents of Seattle.”
In reply, Curtis wrote in jittery, jagged cursive, for which he apologized, “I can’t afford a typist.” He said he’d been in and out of the hospital for the past year and was now bivouacked in the Saturn Street apartment, which felt like a cell. A nurse made regular visits to assist him.
“In other words,” wrote the Shadow Catcher, “I am a shut in.”
He would be happy to tell about his life, but first, a request: “Should you contact any of my old friends, please tell them I’m still alive and expect to be hanging around for at least five years more.” There was plenty of swagger yet in the old boy.
He had started planning a new life in 1932, after leaving the hospital in Denver. “Yes I am certainly broke,” he told Meany then, a condition that matched the financial state of the country. “Other than that, I am not down and out.” Harold, his only son, had moved west, and was interested in mining. So was Curtis. His long stay in the Rockies had fired a passion for gold. He thought there might be a book on the subject for him, and along the way, maybe a strike or two of the precious metal. In studying the various methods for extracting gold dust, Curtis found them wanting. This void produced an invention: the Curtis Counter Current Concentrator, which he had patented. It was a device that looked like a short conveyor belt on an angled ironing board, used to separate flour-fine particles of gold from the detritus of abandoned placer mines. With his confidence restored and his clumsy invention in hand, the sixty-something Curtis charged into the mountains of California and Colorado, as fevered for gold as the Klondike prospectors he had disparaged in his youth.
In October of that year, Clara Curtis climbed into a rowboat near her sister’s home in Bremerton, on Puget Sound. In the chop of a sudden breeze, she fell overboard, into the 42-degree waters, and drowned. That was the official story. Clara was fifty-eight years old. Her obituary in the Seattle Times was three paragraphs.
There was no mention of her famous ex-husband, no mention of the years she’d toiled without notice at one of the world’s best-known picture shops. Her membership in several local organizations was recounted, highlighted by her presidency of the Women’s Commercial Club. And one more thing: “She operated a photographic studio here several years ago.”
With the death of Clara, the last Curtis child left in Seattle, twenty-three-year-old Katherine—called Billy—moved to southern California to be closer to the family. “The three oldest children had basically disowned their mother,” said Jim Graybill, the son of Florence. Katherine, not unlike her older sister Beth, had been a victim of her mother’s rage and instability as the marriage fell apart and she scrimped to pay the bills. Growing up, she never knew her absentee father. Through all those years on the road, Curtis had written her. Some of the letters were fanciful, others full of Indian stories from one reservation or another. But Katherine never saw those personal notes until much later, when they were discovered in an old suitcase. Her mother had hidden them from her. With Katherine’s move, Curtis now had two daughters and his son nearby, and a fourth child in Oregon.
Curtis kicked around many a goldfield, scraping high mountain ground in the Sierra Nevada until dark, the Curtis Concentrator grinding away. He wrote loving, imaginative letters to his grandson Jim, often assuming the point of view of a cat, signing those letters with an inky paw print. And he wrote ruminative, serious ones to Meany. After crawling out of the basement of his depression, Curtis dashed off a forward-looking update to Meany, gossipy and full of plans. He mentioned that his editor Hodge had moved to Los Angeles, having taken up professional residence among the Indian artifacts at the Southwest Museum, with its great hillside perch. And after much sleuthing, he had found Myers at last, living in an apartment in the Bay Area, working as a company secretary at a soft-drink factory. Curtis was writing again, he reported, though nothing an academic would appreciate. “I am tired of being formal,” he told Meany. Most books, he observed as an aside, are not worth the paper they are printed on. So many writers, so many books, and yet what was the value of being published? The joy was in creation, in the act of doing, in discovery. Rejection is not such a bad thing.
Writing to Meany with his newfound breeziness, Curtis hinted that he might have taken several lovers over the course of his life, though he was discreet and named no names—simply a justification. “We all know that from the earliest days of man to today, man’s natural inclination was and is to indulge in sexual wandering.” This was telling, and perhaps confessional. A lifetime of correspondence ended on that note, in August 1934.
Barely six months later, while preparing for his morning class at the University of Washington, Meany fell to the ground and gasped for breath, in the grip of a titanic stroke. The professor died in his office, age seventy-two. Meany was one of the last of the early Pacific Northwest Renaissance men. He’d arrived in Seattle when it was a sodden village of tree stumps and prostitutes, mud running down the streets, oyster pirates sneaking in and out of Elliott Bay. In his time, he had been a newspaper carrier and a newspaper publisher. He’d written scholarly books and short, punchy popular essays. He was one of the first to see the value in native people living camouflaged lives in the midst of a fast-changing region—Indians with a living link to a faraway world, and a culture that the new residents couldn’t begin to fathom. Along with his lectures on forestry, Indians and history, with his political work that established a new campus for the University of Washington and a world’s fair for a young city, he had climbed most of the mountains in the American far corner. A campus hall, a Seattle hotel, a ski lodge and a mountain crest joined to Rainier were all named for him. It was little known until much later that he’d been the soul mate and best friend of Edward Curtis for almost forty years. From the audacity of the original Indian idea, to the college football game with the aging Chief Joseph, to days when Curtis dined at the table of a president, to the midnight blackness of late-middle-aged despair, Ed Meany kept the Shadow Catcher going, always certain of his genius.
In the trough of the Depression, Curtis was living hand to mouth. The economy showed no signs of improving—indeed, it had grown worse, after fiscal belt-tightening in Washington shrank government payrolls that had given a lift to so many towns. And so when Cecil B. DeMille called in 1936 with an offer, Curtis sold his gold concentrator and once again took up the camera. The great director was shooting a big-budget western featuring the most glamorous stars of the day, Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. It was an Indian story, in its way, taking place in the Badlands, with cameo appearances by historical characters like George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody. DeMille planned to shoot it on location in Montana and the Dakotas, and could use Curtis’s help with photographic stills, camera work and logistics. Had Curtis finished up with that Indian business of his?
Indeed, he was free of his life work in every respect. The Morgan Library had received an inquiry about Curtis in 1932, from a collector in Sweden. “I see that the extremely valuable and significant work of ‘The North American Indian’ by Edward S. Curtis has come to its close with the 20th volume,” the collector wrote. But there was no offer forthcoming—just curiosity. “I fear its high price will never make it possible for any library in Sweden to purchase it.” In fact, the House of Morgan was looking to dump its Curtis collection. Throughout the Depression, they ceased any attempt to sell or market the work, which remained in archival hiding. And so, when an offer from a Boston rare-book dealer named Charles E. Lauriat Jr. came along, the library liquidated most of its Curtis holdings. Morgan gave Lauriat the right to sell nineteen complete sets of The North American Indian, in addition to thousands of prints, gravures, the priceless glass-plate negatives and the copyright—all for a mere $1,000.
It was a huge haul of material from the book that had been compared to the King James Bible. Each set contained more than 2,200 original pictures, almost 4,000 pages of text, including transcriptions of hundreds of songs and dozens of languages, plus additional portfolios of oversized photogravures printed on plates. Lauriat also acquired the original copper photogravure plates used to make the images of the book. The library records showed that over the years, only 222 complete sets were bound and given to paid subscribers, mostly institutions, and another 50 were printed but never completely packaged. The Morgan Library held on to copy number 1. A notice in its archives recorded the divorce between patron and benefactor: “On May 15, 1935, the directors of The North American Indian, acting as trustees, assigned all assets to Charles E. Lauriat Company for the purpose of sale.” Lauriat thereafter sold the 19 sets, and eventually assembled 50 or so others into bound volumes, and he made fresh prints as well. A few of the glass-plate negatives kept by the Morgan Library were overlooked in the sale and handover, and later disposed of as junk.
On the movie set of The Plainsman, in eastern Montana, Curtis was home again in the land where he had deciphered the Custer story, where he and the Crow translator Alexander Upshaw had talked well past midnight about the ways of the Apsaroke. DeMille was filming a story of craven Indians and heroic white men, just a few miles east of the Little Bighorn battlefield and within a hawk’s glide of the home of the Sioux. If Cecil B. DeMille had ever asked him, Curtis could tell the story of a people who rode bareback at full sprint, more graceful and powerful than any of the hired hands on this set. He knew the original names of many a mesa, mountain and watering hole. He could pronounce the words, and tell how The People came from a hole in the ground long ago, animated by The Creator. But he was not in the Badlands to convey Indian realism or Indian mythology. He was there in service to Paramount Pictures and a fiction built around Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. The lead Indian roles were played by Paul Harvey (not the radio announcer) and Victor Marconi, with Anthony Quinn in a bit part as a surly native. Curtis’s job was in the background, taking stills of the stars in action, the Italians in Indian paint, the hero Custer who rides in with the cavalry to save the day. A number of Sioux were recruited for a few shots; they were ordered to whoop, holler, grunt and fall down dead.
The movie was a rare crumb of good fortune for Curtis in his old age. He returned to southern California, back to occasional pokes in the Sierra for gold and to steady research for a new book on the oldest metal lure of all. But over time, the body would no longer do the work. He could not will muscles in his bad leg to move, nor could he clamber over rocks without risking a fall. His children told him to give it up. The occasional letter found him, with a query not unlike that of the librarian: are you still alive? A curious Mrs. Gardner from Seattle wrote in 1937, wondering what had become of The North American Indian. “The negatives and copyrights as a whole passed completely from my hands,” Curtis informed her matter-of-factly, adding that he could not use his own work without getting into legal trouble. “I devoted thirty-three years to gathering text material and pictures for the twenty volumes. I did this as a contribution; without salary, direct or indirect financial returns. When I was through with the last volume, I did not possess enough money to buy a ham sandwich; yet the books will remain the outstanding story of the Indian.” At the end of the letter he mentioned that the work was valued overseas—why, in a museum in Great Britain, patrons are not even allowed to touch the pages! “A gloved assistant does it for them,” he noted.
Curtis had reached that stage in life when the social rituals are not weddings or baptisms, but funerals and burials. His younger brother Asahel died in 1941, of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-six. Over the course of his career, he probably took more pictures than did Edward. He shot everything: the first skyscraper in Seattle, the Smith Tower, which for much of the twentieth century was the tallest building in the West; the earth-moving projects that left spires of the original city around as engineers tried to make a flat metropolis; Indians on downtown streets and athletes on the field; dams, schools, office buildings, ships, trains and roads. His camera had a utilitarian eye, without any weakness for sentimentality. He was best known for his outdoor work, as a climber and a conservationist. With Meany—a friend to both Curtis brothers—he guided the Mountaineers through decades of growth, and was the first person to scale many of the iconic peaks in the Northwest, including Mount Shuksan in the North Cascades. He carried his feud with Edward to the end: the brothers had not spoken to each other in over forty years. His ashes were placed at the site of the newly named Asahel Curtis Memorial Grove in Snoqualmie National Forest, east of Seattle. When a son, Asahel Curtis Jr., was asked in 1981 about the brothers’ estrangement, he said only that it was “ridiculous.” And when the same question was put to Jim Graybill in 2012, the sole surviving grandchild of Edward hinted at a shameful story, saying, “I just can’t discuss it.”
Curtis moved to a farm near Whittier, California, owned by Beth and her husband. There, he talked to the chickens, grew avocados and oranges. He was bored and restless, in need of an adventure. He spent hours preparing large meals at family gatherings, where he took issue with anyone who did not see the greatness in his cuisine. Shortly before Harriet Leitch contacted him, Curtis moved back to the Los Angeles.
Near the end of 1948, Curtis started sending memories to the Seattle librarian. While rummaging through a trunk at his daughter’s home, he’d come upon a seventy-four-page memoir he’d written decades before and never published. He spent all afternoon with this account of his adventures—twenty thousand words. “I began reading it at once and found it so interesting that I did not put it down till the final word was reached.” He sent a copy to Leitch, and he also shipped her the major reviews of The North American Indian, from all over the world. These clippings, he wrote, should give her a sense of “the considerable importance of the work.” He said he’d received more than two hundred notices, all favorable but one—a critic who disagreed with Curtis’s revisionist account of the Nez Perce War. (Later historians sided with Curtis.) And he urged Leitch to spend some time with a single book from the series, to pick one at random: “Look at but one volume to see what a task it was to collect such a vast number of words of assorted dialects.” Along the West Coast alone, “we recorded more root languages than exist on the rest of the globe. In several cases we collected the vocabulary from the last living man knowing the words of a language. To me, that is a dramatic statement.”
Leitch was impressed. And she was “thrilled,” she said, to read the autobiographical sketch. She knew his reputation as a photographer, but the anthropological work, the salvage job of languages from the scrap heap of time—that was a revelation. Countless words that had bounced around pockets of the Great Plains or dwelled in hamlets along the Pacific shore lived—still—because Curtis had taken his “magic box,” the cylindrical recorder, along with him when he went to Indian country. Also, he had preserved more than ten thousand songs. And yet, for all the stories, myths, tribal narratives and languages Curtis had saved for the ages, it was curious, the librarian suggested, that the photographer had never told his own story. Why no memoir beyond the sketch he’d sent her? Surely his dashing and perilous life, the unstoppable young man in his Abercrombie and Fitch, the self-educated scholar who made significant breakthroughs in ethnology and anthropology among overlooked nations, his proximity to J. P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt and E. H. Harriman and Gifford Pinchot, his campfire tales from Chief Joseph and Geronimo and the last of the mighty Sioux warriors—surely there was a great, sweeping story to be told.
Curtis had indeed started to record his personal history, sitting for days with his children so that they might have something for posterity. But now he lacked the oomph; the project had been shelved. “Among the foremost why nots, I am not in physical or financial condition to attempt so large an undertaking,” he wrote. Plus, he’d heard a familiar refrain from the gatekeepers of American letters in New York: “A publisher told me there is but a limited market for books dealing with Indian subjects.”
He spent Christmas with Beth—a “delightful” holiday. With the dawn of the new year of 1949, Curtis started to regain some energy. The stories spilled out of him, in letters mailed up the coast to Harriet Leitch. He recalled his father, the sickly preacher and Civil War private, who died when Curtis was fourteen, leaving him to become “the main support of our family.” He told about his accidental avocation, how he took up photography only after a severe back injury prevented him from making a living as a brickmaker or in the lumberyards. He described for Leitch his first Indian picture, Angeline—“I paid the Princess a dollar for each picture I made. This seemed to please her greatly.” He gloried in long accounts of Mount Rainier climbs. He talked about his work habits. “It’s safe to say that in the last fifty years I have averaged sixteen hours a day, seven days a week,” he wrote. “Following the Indian form of naming men, I would be termed, The Man Who Never Took Time To Play.”
Their correspondence carried through another death, in April of 1949—William Myers, the writing talent behind The North American Indian. He had married a second time and moved to Petaluma, north of San Francisco, where he managed a small motel. He was seventy-five at life’s end, six years younger than Curtis. A routine obituary in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat did not bring up Edward Curtis or the fact that Myers had spent the majority of his adult life doing first-rate field anthropology and writing about it for the most detailed study ever done of native people of North America. He was described as a motel manager, retired and childless.
Through the summer and into the fall, Curtis worked away at the book he was building, tentatively titled The Lure of Gold. The walls of his tiny apartment were plastered with notes in his unreadable scratch. “I’m busy with The Lure of Gold,” he wrote Leitch in October, brushing off a fresh round of questions from her about his Indian work. By the spring of 1950, Curtis was almost manic with energy, again crediting his Oregon tea. “My health is improving, and now I look forward to celebrating my 99th birthday.” He parried back dozens of answers: on the reburial of Chief Joseph, on the good work of Professor Meany, and how together they discovered the true story of the Nez Perce, a pattern that followed with the Custer revision. How did he do it? “I didn’t get my information from the white man.”
Near the end of 1950, Curtis turned cranky. If it wasn’t “that damn television” blaring in a neighbor’s apartment, it was his arthritis, which on many days prevented him from holding a pen, let alone set it to paper. On such occasions, he said his “pen died a sudden death.” A few days before Christmas in that year, Belle da Costa Greene passed away in New York City, at the age of sixty-six. Her sway over the Morgan Library had lasted forty-three years, until her retirement in 1948. She never married, and took many of her secrets with her to the grave: she had burned her personal papers shortly before her death.
Curtis limped into 1951, the late-stage burst of energy having dissipated. “I am still housebound,” he wrote, “living the life of a hermit.” He wished for simple things—a stroll to the store to buy his own food, a taste of fresh strawberries, an afternoon on a park bench. “It’s Hell when you can’t go to the market and get what you want.” The apartment was suffocating him. He started calling himself Old Man Curtis, and his handwriting became illegible. In July of 1951, he was forced by finances to move to an even smaller apartment, at 8550 Burton Way, in Beverly Hills. He called it “the most discouraging place I have ever tried to live in.” Through that year, Curtis deteriorated further, though he responded to Harriet Leitch’s prodding in brilliant flashes here and there, with some of his sharpest recollections. He told stories of the Harriman expedition to Alaska in 1899 and of meeting J. P. Morgan for the first time. Teddy Roosevelt was fondly recalled—manly, loyal, robust, a mind as kinetic as that of Curtis himself. Leitch got an account of the Sun Dance with the Piegan and the Snake Dance with the Hopi. On February 16, his eighty-third birthday, Curtis posed for a formal portrait. He still had the Vandyke beard and wore his hat at an angle—no doddering old fool, this man.
Finally, the pace of memory-collecting slowed to a crawl and the words refused to come. Curtis complained about his “scrambled life,” a blur of disconnected images and places, all at the frenzied behest of The Cause. At night, in his dreams, he revisited the Hopi and Apache, the Sky City of Acoma, the Grand Canyon cellar of the Havasupai and the sublime isolation of Nunivak Island. Had he really been to these places? While asleep, he would construct “whole paragraphs in Indian words,” he recalled. These images came at random, as with any dream; it was his only real escape from the prison on Burton Way. He was desperate for a new home. “I have to get away from the smog.” As it became more difficult to summon his past, he apologized.
“This is a bum letter,” he wrote Leitch on July 3, 1951. “I will try to do better in the future.”
“I am nearly blind,” he wrote on August 4. Now, even the carrots had failed him. It was the last letter from an epic gatherer of words and pictures. He had written Leitch twenty-three times over nearly four years of correspondence.
On October 19, 1952, Curtis died of a heart attack. He was eighty-four. It was a national curse, it seemed once again, to take as a life task the challenge of trying to capture in illustrated form a significant part of the American story. The Indian painter George Catlin had died broke and forgotten. Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer who gave up his prosperous portrait business to become a pioneer of photojournalism, spent his last days in a dingy rooming house, alone and penniless. Curtis took his final breath in a home not much larger than the tent he used to set up on the floor of Canyon de Chelly.
E. S. CURTIS, INDIAN-LIFE HISTORIAN, DIES
The Seattle Times, which had shared his glory days as if they were the paper’s own, dismissed Curtis with a six-paragraph obituary that ran on page 33. As brief as it was, the notice in his hometown paper contained a number of inaccuracies, including a claim that Curtis was “Seattle’s first commercial photographer” and that he had gone on the Harriman expedition a full seven years before he ever met Harriman. The New York Times had drafted a lengthy life story when it appeared that Curtis was lost at sea off the Queen Charlotte Islands back in 1914. When he actually died, the paper ran an obituary of seventy-six words, and never directly mentioned The North American Indian. He was called an Indian authority who also did some photography. The obituary said nothing of the languages he recorded and preserved, the biographies he wrote of Indians still alive, the groundbreaking work he did in cinema. Some years later, the Times arranged with the collector Christopher Cardozo to sell “limited edition” lithographs of Curtis pictures, including some of the most iconic—At the Old Well of Acoma, An Oasis in the Badlands, Chief Joseph—and thus began a long, lucrative business offering the Indian pictures of the Shadow Catcher to connoisseurs around the globe.
Collectors were always asking if there was anything still to surface from the Curtis estate. No, Beth insisted: her father had left this world as he’d entered it, without a single possession to his name. That is, with one exception, unknown to outsiders, perhaps even to the House of Morgan, and certainly to the creditors who had chased him from one century to the next. Curtis had held on to a single set of The North American Indian, the twenty volumes taking up five feet of shelf space in the tiny apartment on Burton Way. Though he was alone at death, and friendless, not a single person in those books was a stranger to him.
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