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Indian fighter. He had grown up with people like Cornelius Vanderbilt—at one time
     the richest man in America—as a guest at the family house in Manhattan. He counted
     among his best friends an ambitious young politician, Theodore Roosevelt, just gearing
     up that summer to run for governor of New York. Ten years earlier, Grinnell and Roosevelt
     had founded the Boone and Crocket Club, devoted to preserving wildlife in order to
     have the opportunity to shoot it later. Oh, and it was
Doctor
George Bird Grinnell, a Ph.D. from Yale, though Curtis could call him Bird. Please.
    Another mustachioed man warming his hands at Camp Muir was Clint Merriam.
That Merriam?
Yes. C. Hart Merriam, cofounder of the National Geographic Society, a zoologist and
     ornithologist by trade. He was the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. In that duty
     he had conducted an inventory of the natural world in the United States, a sort of
     Noah’s ark accounting of native plant and animal life before much of it disappeared.
     Though he knew more about birds than perhaps anyone else in the country, Merriam’s
     lasting contribution to the study of the land was his theory of “life zones,” used
     to classify the bioregions of the United States. Merriam’s wild turkey, among other
     species, was named for him. He was a doctor of medicine as well, though Curtis could
     call him Clint.
    As for Mr. Curtis? He had dropped out of school before his twelfth birthday and later
     operated a picture studio in Seattle. His wife, now pregnant with their third child,
     helped to run the shop, along with other family members. Curtis wasn’t going to fake
     it. He could not fathom their academic argot. The names being tossed around—Roosevelt,
     Pinchot, Vanderbilt—he recognized from the papers. He was nobody compared to them,
     an itinerate preacher’s kid trying to make a name for himself in the city on the shores
     of Puget Sound.
    Much of that reputation-building was linked to gold from Alaska. The rush to the Last
     Frontier had started a year earlier, bringing a stampede through Seattle and making
     a fortune for merchants—from the outfitting, financing and fleecing of hapless sourdoughs.
     Ever the opportunist, Curtis himself had taken advantage of the last great American
     gold rush, dispatching his brother Asahel to the frozen fields of the Klondike. Curtis
     followed him shortly thereafter. Back in Seattle, he dashed off a letter to
Century
Magazine,
a leading popular journal. “I have just returned from a trip over different trails
     to the Alaskan gold fields, and have secured the most complete and the latest series
     of photos,” he wrote. He had witnessed the raw side of the scramble—dead horses in
     piles, flimsy tent villages, ramshackle towns. “In fact, these views depict every
     phase of the mad rush to the gold fields and portray the situation and the difficulties
     to be encountered more clearly and truthfully than can any mere pen picture.” It was
     quite a claim: a young man with no experience in journalism boasting that he had captured
     something that everyone else had missed in a big national story. But the gamble paid
     off. The March 1898 issue of
Century
carried a gripping narrative and pictures—“The Rush to the Klondike.”
    The article made a splash for Curtis, but the professional triumph was a personal
     disaster on one level. His brother Asahel, who’d established the contacts in Alaska,
     taken some of the pictures and hauled thousands of glass-plate negatives and developing
     chemicals all through the Klondike in service of Curtis Inc., received no credit.
     He was furious. He said Edward had no right taking his photographs—the product of
     many frozen days in the wretched gold camps—and claiming them as his own. On the contrary,
     Edward said, those pictures belonged to the Curtis studio; his brother was an employee.
     After an explosive spat, Asahel quit. He took all his belongings from Edward’s