The way of the American Indian was vanishing in 1896 when Edward Curtis, the Shadow Catcher, took his first photograph of Chief Seattle's last surviving child, the aging Princess Angeline. This haunting image launched his career as a serious portrait photographer and ultimately as recorder of Native life across the American West. Curtis's photographs would come to be sold in large portfolios and exhibited far and wide. His images are haunting, yet they are staged portraits, carefully posed outdoors--a technique new at the time. This volume by New York Times writer Egan is a slight but powerful account of the life and career of a unique chronicler of American history. Black-and-white images of the works accompany the text. Curtis spent nearly 30 years traveling rough backcountry and convincing reluctant people to pose for his photographs, which many believed would capture their souls forever. They were right, but not in the way they believed. Curtis truly fulfilled his early promise: he made the Indians live forever. A must have for any photography, American history, or Native studies collection, this volume is modest in cost but broad in return of knowledge and enjoyment. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. A. Wirkkala NHTI, Concord's Community College

In the summer of 1900 the American photographer Edward S. Curtis traveled from his home in Seattle to the Blackfeet Nation on the plains of northern Montana. The trip, Timothy Egan writes in a new biography, was a turning point. White Calf, a nearly 60-year-old chief, consented to let Curtis photograph his tribe’s village and its people, for a fair fee. He forbid photography only at the five-day Sun Dance, a ceremony that missionaries and federal agents were trying to eradicate. White Calf even agreed to be photographed himself, but when he showed up for his portrait, he wore a blond wig and a blue United States Army uniform. That wasn’t what Curtis wanted. White Calf’s get-up perhaps referred to George A. Custer, who had met his end a generation earlier at the Little Bighorn. It also, in some sense, mocked Curtis’s impossible mission, which seized him on that very trip and which he pursued with monomaniacal passion for the next three decades: "The North American Indian," a 20-volume encyclopedia of photographs and text on (supposedly) every "intact" American Indian nation on the North American continent. Curtis was born in 1868 to a Civil War veteran and grew up mainly in Minnesota. When he was 19 the Curtises moved to Seattle, where his father died and Curtis, with little schooling, supported the family through a growing portrait studio. Soon he discovered mountaineering in the Cascade Range and also began photographing Indians around Seattle, avocations that admitted him into the fraternity of American explorers, naturalists and ethnographers and that ultimately led to "The North American Indian." The project would destroy his marriage, his health and his finances. By 1936 he had ceded the copyright to the 20 volumes, and he returned to Montana to shoot promotional stills for Cecil B. DeMille’s film "The Plainsman," which starred Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur and featured caricatures of villainous Indians. Blond wig and Hollywood Indians — these surreal bookends to "The North American Indian" are mentioned, but buried, in Mr. Egan’s "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis." Mr. Egan might have emphasized aspects of Curtis’s life and work that truly confounded the Hollywood image of the West: the modern savvy of the Indians he photographed, the cosmopolitan nature of even the "cellars, attics and aeries of the continent," the interdependence of East and West. (This seminal Western project was bankrolled by J. P. Morgan’s fortune.) Instead he depicts Curtis as a sort of Daniel Boone for the REI customer. Mr. Egan, who covered the American West for The New York Times and now contributes to its Web site, is a brisk and muscular writer, with a knack for vernacular prose. His 2005 book, "The Worst Hard Time," deservedly won the National Book Award for its portrayal of a cast of hard-bitten victims of the Dust Bowl. In this book, deploying his knowledge of the terrain, he can amplify a source’s terse account of a near-death-trail folly into pages of nail-biting drama. He also considers Curtis’s photographs thoughtfully, comparing the rich light of a photogravure portrait to Vermeer’s "Milkmaid," or describing a "face-painted beauty with a careless gaze, skin as smooth as a bar of soap." Each chapter closes with a couple of halftone images discussed in preceding pages, which confirm Curtis’s darkroom genius. But for readers less enchanted by the manly West of yore, the adventures may wear thin. The dude worship of Theodore Roosevelt and Curtis ("a man without a breath of doubt — the tall, reservation-trotting, horse-whispering Westerner in his Abercrombie & Fitch") grows fatiguing. Mr. Egan even disparages the modern Columbia River as "flaccid, clipped by more than a dozen big dams." He seems to pine for the West before it was emasculated. Then there is the problem of Curtis’s 20-volume magnum opus itself. For countless summers this reservation-trotter tramped around Indian country, capturing portraits and scenes from "primitive" Indian life. Often he staged scenes based on research, and even memorably Photoshopped (so to speak) an alarm clock out of a picture taken inside a tepee. As gorgeous and useful as much of his work remains, the project as Curtis conceived it was a fool’s errand. He hurried to salvage scraps of pristine Indian culture, because, he said, "There won’t be anything left of them in a few generations, and it’s a tragedy." He had been infected with the white American fantasy that Indians were the "Vanishing Race," to use the title of the opening image of the entire series. It depicts a line of Navajos, barely more than silhouettes, riding away from the camera and into a dark oblivion. The vanishing Indian was an old chestnut; it had motivated Curtis’s artistic forebear, the painter George Catlin, back in the 1830s. Curtis updated it with a new medium and shades of turn-of-the-century anti-modernism. Though Mr. Egan makes him out to be an unsung advocate for Indians, Curtis’s pictures actually supported the idea that Indians must inevitably melt away in the heat of modernity. These images give no hint of the continuing effort by the federal government and white settlers to steal Indians’ land and livelihood. From at least 1900 onward Indian populations were increasing, a trend Curtis brushed off because he counted only a certain kind, "purebloods" with "primitive" culture. What’s most absurd about the "Vanishing Race" image is that its subjects are riding horses. That’s right: they had adopted a useful European technology centuries earlier and remained Indian despite the vast changes the horse had wrought in Indian cultures and geopolitics. Yet Curtis believed that an alarm clock would be the death of them. Mr. Egan misses a deeper tragedy in his portrayal of Curtis as an intrepid visionary who sacrificed his family and personal life for what Mr. Egan calls his "Big Idea." Despite Curtis’s noble intentions and great talent, his work was at heart quite like DeMille’s: It denied his beloved Indians a place in the modern world. (Fortunately, as the epilogue notes, many tribes have since repurposed "The North American Indian" for their own cultural revitalization, using Curtis’s images as they teach children indigenous languages and traditions.) In "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher" Mr. Egan has set his lens too close to his subject to focus on what was most troubling, and most compelling, about him.

New York Times Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Egan (The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, 2009, etc.) returns with the story of the astonishing life of Edward Curtis (18681952), whose photographs of American Indians now command impressive prices at auction. This is an era of excessive subtitles--but not this one: "Epic" and "immortal" are words most fitting for Curtis, whose 20-volume The North American Indian, a project that consumed most of his productive adult life, is a work of astonishing beauty and almost incomprehensible devotion. Egan begins with the story of Angelina, Chief Seattle's daughter, who in 1896 was living in abject poverty in the city named for her father. Curtis--who'd begun a Seattle photography shop--photographed her, became intrigued with the vanishing lives of America's Indians and devoted the ensuing decades both to the photography of indigenous people all over North America and to the writing of texts that described their culture, languages, songs and religion. Curtis scrambled all his life for funding--J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt were both supporters, though the former eventually took over the copyrights and sold everything to a collector during the Depression for $1,000--and spent most of his time away from home, a decision that cost him his marriage. His children, however, remained loyal, some later helping him with his project. As Egan shows, Curtis traveled nearly everywhere, living with the people he was studying, taking thousands of photographs. He nearly died on several occasions. Egan is careful to credit Curtis' team, several of whom endured all that he did, though, gradually, he became the last man standing, and he reproduces a number of the gorgeous photographs. Lucent prose illuminates a man obscured for years in history's shadows.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Before half its 20 volumes were published, The North American Indian was called the most important book since the King James Bible. When the last emerged, its director and primary researcher and author, self-made master photographer Edward Curtis (1868-1952), was old, broke, and dependent on his daughters. Though his great work consumed $2.5 million of J. P. Morgan's money over the course of three decades, Curtis never took a cent in salary. He lost his business, his property, his marriage, and any control of his great project. But he completed it, preserving a great deal of what we know about Indian cultures, including more than 75 languages, thousands of songs and stories, traditional practices in everything from clothing to religious ritual, and the Indian accounts of such historic milestones as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Simultaneously, he fixed the image of the North American Indian in a body of work as iconic as any created by any other visual artist in any medium. To accomplish this, he braved the remote, nearly inaccessible places where small tribes clung to their identities, painstakingly won the confidence of wary elders in many larger tribes, and wooed the titans of American wealth to keep going. Ace popular historian Egan makes Curtis' story frequently suspenseful, always gripping, and monumentally heroic.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Egan (The Worst Hard Time) turns his attention to one of Seattle's most remarkable-yet all but forgotten-residents. In the late 19th century, Edward Curtis was the era's reigning portrait photographer, so well respected that President Theodore Roosevelt chose him to photograph his daughter's wedding. Yet in 1900, at the height of his fame, Curtis gave it up to pursue what would become his life's work-"a plan to photograph all the intact Native American tribes left in North America" before their ways of life disappeared. This idea received the backing of J.P. Morgan and culminated in a critically acclaimed 20-volume set, The North American Indian, which took Curtis 30 years to complete and left him divorced and destitute. Unfailingly sympathetic to his subject, Egan shadows Curtis as he travels from Roosevelt's summer home at Sagamore Hill to the mesas and canyons of the Southwest tribes and to the rain forests of the Coastal Indians and the isolated tundra on Nunivak Island. Egan portrays the dwindling tribes, their sacred rites (such as the Hopi snake dance), customs, and daily lives, and captures a larger-than-life cast. With a reporter's eye for detail, Egan delivers a gracefully written biography and adventure story. Agent: Carol Mann, Carol Mann Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Edward Curtis's photographs have been controversial since their rediscovery in the 1970s. Although his work documented Native American cultures, he was also guilty of framing his subjects in ways that emphasized his belief that they were a dying people. Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a National Book Award recipient for The Worst Hard Time, examines Curtis's life (1868--1952) from 1896 until his death, the years he worked on his 20-volume The North American Indian. Although his supporters included such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, Curtis struggled throughout his life to maintain the project. His cause was hindered by his efforts to help the Native Americans he encountered as he alienated Indian agents and other government officials by demanding that they respect the basic human rights of the local populace. Most damaging to his reputation and his financing efforts was his claim, based on eyewitness accounts, that Gen. George Armstrong Custer's actions at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were not heroic, but in fact cowardly. Egan seeks to restore Curtis to a deserved high reputation. VERDICT This fascinating biography is recommended to readers interested in the American West from the late 19th through early 20th century.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.