The Shadow Catcher

I show her a print of two Piegan braves seated in their tipi with a prized clock between them; and then I place Curtis’s preferred version of that print, the one he published, next to it. The clock has been erased, manipulated in the darkroom.

“Curtis would take one Indian from one tribe, a Piegan, let’s say, and dress him up in Assiniboin regalia, and that was fine by him. Dressing Navajos as Siouxes. But if there was any totem of modernity — a car, a clock, a zipper or a waistcoat, Curtis would do everything he could to guarantee it was erased.”

“So what’s your point?”

“—my ‘point’? My point is these photographs have been constructed for a purpose. An artistic purpose, yes — they’re beautiful to look at. But they’re lies. They’re propaganda.”

“Oh come on — look at these faces. These faces don’t lie. These faces are beautiful. And they’re full of truth…“

…I see dignity. Humanity. And strength,” she adds.

“—and I see something bought and paid for by Big Business. In this case, by Union Pacific. By J.P. Morgan and the railroads. Where do you think Curtis got the money to finance all these photographs? Granted, he tried to raise the funds outside the corporate sphere by appealing first to Teddy Roosevelt and the Smithsonian—”

“Curtis was in touch with Teddy Roosevelt?”

“He photographed him.”

“—when T.R. was president?”

“Curtis photographed T.R.’s daughter Alice’s White House wedding.”

“—he was a wedding photographer, too? — more and more I love this guy! How well did he know T.R.? Did they talk? Do they have scenes together? Who can we get who’s big enough to play ‘Teddy Roosevelt’?”

I ignore this and plug on: “When the Smithsonian turned Curtis’s project down, Roosevelt wrote a letter of introduction to J.P. Morgan for him. And they met.”

“What a great scene.”

“—yes, it was. And Curtis got a lot of mileage from it. According to his version of their meeting, Morgan turned him down at first, but Curtis refused to leave until Morgan promised him the money. Curtis asked for $15,000 a year for six years to put the collected photographs together — more than half a million in today’s dollars — and Morgan told him the Bible had cost less, but he finally wrote the check. And that’s where I start to question our hero, as a hero. The man who built the transcontinental railroad, the man who was Union Pacific, the man who was behind the wholesale slaughter of the Plains buffalo is the man Curtis goes to to finance these portraits of Plains Indians, who depended on the buffalo for their existence. Don’t you think that’s — oh, I don’t know—suspect?”

“Who can we get to play J.P. Morgan?” she asks Michelle. “They were fat, weren’t they. Big men, back then. All those guys…Roosevelt and Morgan…”

“It was a sign of wealth,” Jon puts in. “Even with the women.”

“If only there was, like, a white James Earl Jones,” Michelle says.

“Nicholson could do it,” Stacey suggests.

They’re so busy seeing movies in their heads I wonder if they’ve heard a word I’ve said. “All I want you to understand, before you read the book I’ve written, before you even spend another day entertaining the idea that Edward Curtis was a saint, or a poet, or a hero, is that his life was long. His life was, as I’ve said, complicated. And, like every one of us, he was less than perfect. Less than ideal. Certainly not the man he strove so hard to make everyone believe he was. Possibly destructive. Certainly painfully dangerous to anyone who loved him. And never without blame.”

“—oh my god,” Alison recognizes: “You fell out of love with him.”

“She did and she didn’t,” Jon tries to explain.

“—I did. And then I didn’t.”

I push another portrait forward.

“What’s this?” Alison asks.

“Our hero. A later version.”

“—yikes. What happened to him?”

“Life. Eighty-four years is a lot of living. I know you have a version of him that you’re fond of, but all I’m saying is you have to understand that there are several versions of your man out there, as I was disappointed to discover. What I finally had to do was make a kind of map of his whole life, draw a sketch of it, as if it were a landscape — then look down on it, like I was flying over it, so I could see the patterns.”

“And what were they?”