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

a chaplain, taxidermists, guides and the Harriman family.
     Curtis was the youngest and least credentialed member of the expedition, and he brought
     along an assistant, Duncan Inverarity, a friend from Seattle. Among those sailing
     north were the two best-known naturalists in America, John Muir and John Burroughs,
     both long-bearded and long-winded, called “the Two Johnnies.” Also on board was a
     lanky gentleman with faraway eyes whose name was constantly in the papers: Gifford
     Pinchot, a man of the woods, from a wealthy family. At night, the ship’s salon hosted
     arcane discussions by the scientists, speaking mostly in Latin, “fearfully and wonderfully
     learned,” as Burroughs put it. The German-born forester Bernhard Fernow played Beethoven
     on the grand piano. Pinchot went on at length about how the outdoors made him feel
     most alive. The Two Johnnies argued, a flutter of white beards and spokes of fingers
     poking each other’s chests. By day, the scientists would disembark in a particular
     bay, and then bring back all sorts of plants, fish and wildlife to the ship, where
     they were picked apart. The
Elder
steamed past the rainforest shores of southeast Alaska, up into Glacier Bay, through
     the inlets of Prince William Sound, out along the far edge of the Aleutian Islands,
     touching the Siberian shore—where Mrs. Harriman wanted to leave a footprint in Russia—and
     then back, a nine-thousand-mile round-trip. No junket, the expedition claimed to have
     discovered six hundred species new to science, putting some of the best minds of new-century
     America to good use.
    For Curtis, the
Elder
was a floating university—an Ivy League one at that. From E. H. Harriman he learned
     how to operate an audio recording device, a wax cylinder that could pick up and preserve
     sound. It was an expensive, newfangled toy for the railroad tycoon and his seven-year-old
     son, Averell. Curtis realized the recorder could be used to preserve the songs and
     words of the people they observed along the way. Outside Sitka, the machine recorded
     a Tlingit chant. Curtis was closest to Grinnell, an easterner who acted more like
     a westerner and who conveyed a sense of urgency about the passing of so much that
     was original to the continent. Grinnell was a member of the expedition because of
     his knowledge of birds, but he seemed more interested in the native people they met.
     These villagers in animal skins and furs were ogled at by most of the scientists,
     treated like exotic species or fossilized relics. When the ship sailed into a bay
     where women were skinning seals, most of the Harriman elites were repulsed by the
     smell and carnage. Curtis waded ashore and spent a day talking to the natives and
     taking pictures. The photographs show people who seem annoyed, at best, by the intrusion
     of well-outfitted Anglos. There are no moonlit silhouettes, no soft-focus portraits.
     The photos have a hard, documentary edge.
    The Curtis method was simple: get as close as he could. He worked the same way with
     the landscapes. In shooting nearly five thousand photographs for the expedition, he
     sometimes leapt from iceberg to iceberg, slipped on polished stones in freezing streams
     and hiked to the edge of crevasses. Once, in his canoe in Glacier Bay, he tried to
     get close to a heaving ice field that was calving big chunks. Crewmen on board the
Elder
watched in amusement as Curtis paddled toward an enormous, berg-shedding glacier.
     He took several glass-plate impressions, then moved in closer. And then—horror. A
     calf of ice nearly ten times the size of the steamship broke away with a thunderous
     crack and splash, sending a wall of waves toward Curtis’s tiny canoe. “About half
     a mile of the front fell at once,” Burroughs wrote. The photographer paddled directly
     into a wave, a suicide impulse, it seemed. But instead of being crushed and drowned,
     Curtis rode the high waters to their crests—to the