Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online

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     and promised to go out on his own and compete with the other Curtis. From then on,
     the brothers would not speak to each other. At chance encounters around town, they
     turned away, as to a stranger.
    After detailing his somewhat exaggerated Alaskan experience to Merriam and Grinnell,
     Curtis told them he also knew a thing or two about Indians, though again, not from
     books. He had learned by observation. His pictures of Indians around Puget Sound had
     just been chosen for an exhibition sponsored by the National Photographic Society—the
     most prestigious showing in the country. And a few weeks earlier, while leading another
     Mazama expedition, to the top of Mount St. Helens, Curtis had come upon two Indians
     drying bark in the woods. He stayed behind to chat with the men and photograph them.
     This early Indian picture, owned by the Mazamas and almost never seen, is a startling
     piece of photojournalism, showing natives deep in a forest at the base of a restless
     mountain; they are wearing long pants and white men’s shirts, grimacing at the camera.
    Grinnell and Merriam were intrigued by this lanky man who’d appeared out of the fog
     on a glacier, all blue eyes and bounce in his step. Just before Curtis “thawed them
     out and bedded them down,” as Curtis later conveyed to a friend, he mentioned a few
     more details about the tribes of the maritime West. This business of the potlatch,
     the Indian ritual of giving away worldly goods, was an extraordinary event. There
     was nothing more honorable. And yet government agents were trying to ban the potlatch—they
     considered it barbaric, unfit for a race that needs to join the lot of civilization.
     Canada had made it a crime for Coast Salish people to participate in their most esteemed
     ceremony. The two men leaned into their rescuer:
Tell us more.
     
    A few days later, Curtis hosted the distinguished gentlemen at his studio, a showroom
     of the finest faces in Seattle and the most gloried scenery in the region. But the
     easterners were fascinated by his Indian pictures. A big part of his business now
     came from selling “Curtis Indians,” as they were advertised in a brochure, and his
     search for native people had taken him well beyond the city, east of the Cascades,
     where he found a band of the Nez Perce living at the edge of the Columbia River on
     wind-raked scablands. And farther east, into Montana, he’d gone for glimpses of buffalo-dependent
     tribes. His Indians were a startling departure from the usual depictions of these
     people. There were, in the faces, distinct human beings, not character types. How
     did he do it?
    Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours
     of study. Though he’d gone many times to Rainier, much of the mountain had eluded
     him as a subject. He said it could take years to get it right, years when he might
     return from the glaciers empty-handed. You had to understand the essence of a thing
     before you could ever hope to capture its true self. And yes, he was trying to bring
     a painterly eye to the process, a subjective artistry. No reason to apologize. He
     believed that no two people could point a camera at something and come away with the
     same image. But, of course, photography involved a mechanical side as well, and there
     too, you could shape the final product to match a vision—to bring the right image
     to light from a stew of chemicals, to touch it up in a print shop, to finish with
     an engraving pen. Curtis never turned it off, never took time to play or let his mind
     roam, even at home. At night in the big Seattle house, “he studied pictures,” Clara’s
     cousin William Phillips recalled, “the whys and wherefores; the ifs and the ands:
     landscapes, portraits, marine views and studies from old masters. He reveled in such,
     in his musings, in his thoughts and conceptions.”
    Curtis often slept in his studio, working until first light. In the