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

early morning,
     when his wife arrived to open the shop for business, she would find him slumped against
     a wall, fresh-printed pictures spread all over the floor, his clothes wrinkled, cigarette
     stubs in a pile. And then he would snap to, rub his face and resume his work as if
     he’d never taken a break. He boasted that he needed very little sleep to function
     well; he had a prodigious amount of energy. His tank was always full.
    “Wait till you see the next picture I make,” he would exclaim. “It’s going to be a
     crackerjack!”
    His labors would be rewarded with one of the biggest prizes in American photography.
     The pictures prompted by Princess Angeline’s routine and repeat visits to the Tulalip
     reservation—
The Clam Digger
and
The Mussel Gatherer,
along with
Homeward
—had made the finals. And
Homeward,
which showed Puget Sound Indians in a high-bowed canoe backlit by the sun-infused
     clouds of early evening, won the grand prize: a gold medal from the National Photographic
     Society. Soon, those pictures would tour the world.
    As impressed as the visitors were by Curtis the photographer and Curtis the mountaineer,
     they were equally interested in Curtis the amateur anthropologist. He had collected
     bits of mythology and tribal narratives along his picture-taking path, and wrote up
     summaries of these scraps of the Indians’ inner world. For decades Grinnell had fought
     to save the American bison, using his influential mouthpiece,
Forest and Stream,
to shame speculators of buffalo hides and skulls, the mindless poachers with rapid-fire
     rifles who had reduced a bounty of perhaps sixty million to a few hundred stragglers.
     Grinnell’s passion for lost causes was now focused on Plains Indians. The Pawnee,
     the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne—they’d been pushed to the brink, and their culture was
     being erased from the land of their grandparents. In Grinnell’s view, the way to understand
     Indians was to become more like them, rather than insist that the tribes become more
     like us. He had lived with Plains Indians for twenty seasons, could speak the language
     and many dialects, and had published
Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales.
The Blackfeet had made him an honorary member of the tribe. Grinnell feared that
     in just a few years’ time, these natives might end up like the buffalo.
    To Grinnell and Merriam, departing from the Pacific Northwest after a fortuitous
     encounter on the region’s highest peak, this Curtis man seemed like quite the resourceful
     fellow. He knew Alaska, mountains and Indians. He was fast on his feet, quick with
     a joke, full of practical knowledge, physically heroic.
    Over the winter, they stayed in touch. And in the spring of 1899 Merriam made a proposal
     to Curtis: how would he like to join the largest scientific exploration of Alaska
     ever undertaken? The idea came from the Gilded Age titan Edward Henry Harriman, who
     had just gained full control of the Union Pacific Railroad as part of a bigger scheme
     to monopolize rail traffic—much to the annoyance of his chief rival, J. P. Morgan.
     The deal-making had left Harriman, at the age of fifty-one, exhausted; his doctor
     recommended a long cruise. Harriman turned his hiatus into something much bigger.
     He strode into the Washington, D.C., office of C. Hart Merriam with a plan to stock
     a large ship with the finest zoologists, geologists, botanists and ethnologists and
     go forth in search of the unknown. Merriam would organize the scientific party. Harriman
     would pay for it all. It was to be the last great exploratory expedition of its kind
     in North America, dating to the Lewis and Clark journey a hundred years earlier. Curtis
     would be the official photographer.
     
    The steamship
George W. Elder
left Seattle on the final day of May 1899, loaded down with milk cows and chickens,
     a well-stuffed library and a well-stocked bar, and 126 people, including two medical
     doctors, a chef and sous-chef,