Review: Egan, Tim. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Boston: Mariner Books, 2011..

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is one of those rare nonfiction works that capture a time, a place, and a person so well it is a bit like reading fiction.  It helps that I am drawn to characters such as Edward Curtis, men given to wanderlust and noble – often lost –causes.  Author Tim Egan paints a rather romantic portrait of a self-taught photographer and anthropologist whose life work was to roam western North America photographing, filming, audio recording, data collecting, and writing on the remaining tribes of Native Americans.  Any hint of liaisons with Indian women, for example, is left to near the end of the story, and Curtis’ only fault seems to be his obsession with his project, leading to the ruin of his finances and marriage.

There is no question that Curtis’ three decades of intense labor is a monumental and genuine gift to humanity, a 20 volume document of the last days of the western Native Americans, The North America Indian.  Egan provides a few examples in Shadow Catcher’s final chapter of how modern descendants of several tribes have used Curtis’ data to reconstruct languages and practices entirely or partially forgotten.  Scholars have used Curtis’ oral accounts to reconstruct and rewrite important events in US history, such as the Battle of Little Big Horn, the last great pitched battle between Indians and Anglos.  Apart from more utilitarian applications, though, is the sheer aesthetic effect, the poignancy of haunted images of a land and a people forgotten by time.   Curtis clearly had great affinity for his subjects and devoted his life that we might see them as they might like to be remembered.

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