It is, nonetheless, a remarkable story that Egan tells. Roger Porter of Reed College asks “what else does a biographer do but uncover documentary evidence, determine its importance, and use it to interpret the subject under study?’ Egan performs the first two tasks successfully, but does little to “interpret” Curtis in the way that, to use one example, Edmund Morris does for his subject in his splendid biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Simply chronicling a life is not the same as biography. Because his heart is on his sleeve in the alimony trail, Curtis comes alive, and that highlights what’s missing from most of the book-access to Curtis’ inner life, as opposed to a chronicle of his business dilemmas, or the tribulations of accomplishing his life’s work.

Still, until the final pages, when his account of Curtis’ humiliation and collapse brings him alive in ways the chronicle of his years of struggle and triumph never quite do, the tone of Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is restrained, as if Egan is reluctant to evaluate as well as narrate. On the other hand, writing that the Dakota plains “were a ghost prairie in 1907-an empty pantry,” or that “vandals and thieves were actively chiseling away the centuries of life left behind in the cliffs” of Anasazi dwellings, get it just right. Egan also strains for effect when he writes that “coming from the maritime Northwest, where rain fell as soft and persistent mist, Curtis was not used to such muscular meteorological mood changes” as he encountered in the southwest. Writing that newly rich Seattle residents would “pay handsomely to have the name Curtis etched below their hagiographic mugs,” for example, is showy. Timothy Egan’s heartbreaking account of the trial that followed illuminates both Edward Curtis’ extraordinary life and the limitations of Egan’s biographical method.ĭrawing heavily on Curtis’ unpublished autobiography, as well as on archival research (including in the records of Portland’s legendary climbing club, the Mazamas), Egan’s account of Curtis’ thirty-year quest to memorialize native life at the turn of the 20th century in The North American Indian seems reliable, thorough and, as one would expect from a writer who’s won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, well-written, if occasionally straining for the mot juste. 412 pages, $28.00Įxactly eighty-five years ago this week, Seattle’s “most famous citizen,” returning from a successful summer of field work in Alaska undertaken for the final volume of his monumental photographic and ethnographic survey of the “vanishing” native peoples of western North America, was arrested by King County deputies for his alleged failure to make alimony payments.

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

Short nights of the shadow catcher