"To Catch the Lightning": The man who captured Native American life

"To Catch the Lightning"

by Alan Cheuse

Sourcebooks, 486 pp., $25.95

Edward S. Curtis, the Seattle-based photographer who recorded fast-fading Native American lives and rituals in the early 20th century, was sometimes accused of romanticizing his subject.

There's no question that he staged some events for his movies and photo sessions, lightly fictionalizing his material by dressing up modern Indians in the costumes of their ancestors.

Similar methods are employed by Curtis' latest biographer, Alan Cheuse, who has turned Curtis' life into a whopping tall tale of a novel. Like his subject, Cheuse's "To Catch the Lightning" can't help emphasizing the more dramatic and mythical aspects of the story he's telling. But most of the tale is true.

Curtis' children, Hal and Beth, narrowly escaped early death when they joined their father on his expeditions, and Curtis himself seemed fearless when faced with life-threatening situations. Several chapters here are designed as cliffhangers, and they certainly succeed on that page-turning level.

The book, which ends with Curtis' death in 1952, makes use of several voices to suggest varying views of what happened during the decades Curtis spent recording the customs of vanishing tribes.

Chief among them: his assistant, William Myers, a young Seattle Times reporter who supplied the words to go with Curtis' pictures; "jimmy fly-wing," a well-educated Indian who had a knack for showing up at key moments; and Curtis' unhappy wife, Clara, who claimed her husband was throwing his life away on "pagans" and "strangers."

Certainly he trashed the opportunity for a stable family life when he committed himself "to capture a way of life that was dying just as another was being born" (Myers' words), but his children mostly sympathized with his visionary motivation. So did President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a foreword to his books, and J.P. Morgan, who financed much of his work.

Driving Curtis toward his goal was a series of recurring visions, including one of a clam-digging chief's daughter who made him fear that "if he lingered too long she might draw his own spirit into hers and never let him go." He also feels bewitched by an Indian beauty named Tasawiche: "without even touching her, he betrayed his wife."

When he joins a ceremony and drinks a dung-heavy "magic soup," he goes on a hallucinatory journey worthy of Carlos Castaneda. He's told by an Apache chief that he has "good friends in the spirit world"; jimmy fly-wing claims that spirits have "commissioned me to watch over him."

These experiences lead to a chapter that's made up almost entirely of stream-of-consciousness sentences, and an increasingly detached view of reality. The clam-digging woman returns to claim "there are many worlds" beyond what most people acknowledge, and she all but commands Curtis to agree.

Because the book focuses on Curtis' mission and his inability to live any other kind of life, Clara becomes a bit of a nag and, occasionally, a drag on a narrative that could have been shorter. Colorful but less than essential are Cheuse's accounts of Curtis' increasingly futile visits to New York and his brief association with Cecil B. DeMille in the 1920s.

As for criticisms of Curtis' methods, which were used most famously in his 1914 movie "In the Land of the Head-Hunters" (recently shown at the Moore Theatre, as part of the Seattle International Film Festival), Cheuse lets Myers have the final word:

"We could have photographed Nunivak Island men in their everyday clothing, and photographed their spectacular masks and costumes separately," he writes. "Why not put them together?"