Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan

Reviewed by Janice Riley

Edward S. Curtis died of heart failure in 1952, penniless and obscure, at the age of 84, holding no rights to any of his life’s work; he had lost everything to create it. In 2009, a rare, complete twenty-volume set of his masterwork, The North American Indian, re-surfaced and was sold at auction for $1.8 million.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (2012) tells an astonishing, and tragic story, superbly, and with impeccable research. The author, Timothy Egan, is a Seattle-based Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times who has written extensively, and well, on significant subjects of our common American history. This book reads like a novel, with twists and turns, disappointments and stunning achievements, as it recounts Curtis’s self-imposed mission to document the “vanishing culture” of Native Americans, set at the dramatic turn of 20^th century America. It is no small part of the story that this daunting quest was undertaken by a heroic effort that would cost the photographer everything, until he himself vanishes. He leaves behind his name, a vapor trail across haunting images, caught as if in sepia-toned amber that will live forever.

Curtis’s background couldn’t have been more obscure. Born in 1868 into a “dirt poor” family, his father was an itinerant minister. His formal schooling ended by the age of 12, but he was possessed of a native intelligence, curious mind, strong constitution, and boundless energy. The boy was deeply affected by the powerful landscapes the family traveled through and built his first box camera to capture what he saw. By 14, as his father’s health declined, more and more responsibilities fell on his shoulders. They settled in Puget Sound where young Edward built a log cabin and the family began homesteading. His father died almost immediately. At twenty, Curtis became the family’s sole supporter, relying on his skills at hunting, trapping, fishing, clamming, and farming. But his interest in photography never waned. He ventured forth into the bustling city of Seattle and was taken on as an apprentice in a photography studio. By 1895 had married, welcomed a son, and was making enough money with his growing reputation to bring his entire family to live in their impressive new home.

He had fallen in love with the brooding northwest coast and took to the field when he wasn’t in his studio, already making its name for portraiture of the local elite, dignitaries, debutantes, as well as picturesque urban scenes. Curtis couldn’t have been born at a more propitious time to pursue his new passion, which lay outside the studio. His first Native American portrait was of the elderly, nearly homeless “hag” known as “Princess” Angeline whose father Chief Seattle provided the name for the state’s major city. From there he sought out others she told stories of, living closer to the old ways on the outskirts of the city, from which all Indians were barred. In this community of outcasts Curtis delighted to find new material. He visited frequently, paying them for their “labor” as he began amassing his collection of “Curtis Indians.” In 1903, Chief Joseph, the famous Nez Percé warrior, whose surrendering words, ”I will fight no more forever,“ are long-remembered, was invited to Seattle by the Washington Historical Society. Curtis convinced him to sit for a photograph, capturing a solemn image that was later called his “most famous portrait.” Joseph would die a year later. Angeline had died within a year of her portrait. The clock had begun to tick in Curtis’s mind as he witnessed the passing of Native elders dissolving into the ethers before his eyes.

Curtis had come far on his own efforts, but it was a stroke of good luck, his first of many, that was destined to change his life forever. An avid outdoorsman and mountaineer, in 1898, he came to the rescue of an expedition in the avalanche-ridden heights of Mt. Rainier. Members of that expedition included George Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, and Clint Merriam, co-founder of the National Geographic Society. Taken with this energetic and charismatic adventurer, photographer, and amateur anthropologist, they invited him to join their next expedition- the largest scientific exploration of Alaska ever undertaken, with dignitaries as well known as John Muir and John Burroughs and as powerful as the Union Pacific Railway tycoon Edward H. Harriman. The connections he would forge from this chance encounter brought Curtis the friendship and support of, soon to be president, Theodore Roosevelt, and, eventually, with plenty of strings attached, the financial backing of financier J. P. Morgan.

His ‘big idea” began taking shape: to publish a collection of twenty books entitled the North American Indian chronicling all the tribes of America. It was the work of 100 men. But he was a determined man and a persuasive one, hiring on associates who would help shape his vision. He was an eloquent, handsome, and dashing character, never brash or egotistical, but supremely self-confident, poised and charismatic. He had his detractors, especially among tenured anthropologists who derided his lack of qualifications and derided some of them for their paucity of experience in the field. Curtis was an idealist, but a hard working one, driven by a relentless deadline, a dark cloud already looming overhead erasing the shadows he chased across every horizon. He rarely slept. “It is thus near to Nature that the life of the Indian still is” he wrote in the introduction to his first volume; his professed mission- to capture both, nature and native, in their interwoven relationship, with “a broad and luminous picture” as it dissolved before his eyes, the very “phenomena of the universe” that seemed invisible to most other Americans.

Edward Sherriff Curtis spent over three decades in the field capturing the iconic images of Native Americans now so synonymous with his name, but to the Navajo his name was the Shadow Catcher. Native Americans have said that it is our shadow self who lives here on earth, the real self, the spirit, being invisible. Curtis captured that shadow self and the luminosity of spirit that animates it. Author Timothy Egan has done us a great service with this book, filling in previously sketchy details of the photographer’s life with a journalist’s precision and vivid prose, though often romanticizing his subject as Curtis did with his. This reader had little idea of the cost to Curtis of his great vision, nor of his lesser-known, but no less significant achievements- while amassing his collection of 40,000 photographs he recorded the dialects, music, customs, and myths of all the tribes he visited. His was an extraordinary life in an extraordinary time in American history, a life of adventure, challenge, engagement, and meaning, but not without heart ache and privation. His technical expertise and the artistic challenges he overcame seem remarkable today carrying, not a digital camera, but a 14” by 17” wooden box on stilts with fragile glass plates and dangerous chemicals on horseback, mule, and wagon across deserts, down rapids and precipitous canyons, and high atop glacial mountain ranges. To appreciate the “scope and measure” of his accomplishments, one has only to look at even a few of the images he captured: Before the Storm- Apache; Cañon de Chelly; Mosa- Mohave; Chief Joseph- Nez Perce. The photographs Egan selected for his book, which leave you longing for more, are notable for their beauty, however, the reproductions do little justice to the originals and would have been well-served by a glossary.

Curtis’s images stand today as if they are our own memory, a “touching and melancholy poem” of a vanished time. Each photograph is a testament to his exquisite craftsmanship and his grasp of the mysterious power of the image, as symbol of something ethereal left behind- always more than what is depicted in pools of light and wavering shadows. This fascinating biography of one of America’s great historical figures is long overdue and couldn’t be more highly recommended.