Crossing the Continent – The First Train

Object Details

Object Essay

Henry Farny never lived among the Indians for any length of time, nor did he compose his illustrations and paintings on his excursions among them. His home was Cincinnati, and from there he made five known excursions (1881–1894) into the Western states and territories, usually staying for several months at a time, making great numbers of sketches, taking photographs, and collecting artifacts. From these materials he produced his watercolors, gouaches, and oils in his Cincinnati studio.^{1_{Appleton and Bartalini, The Realistic Expressions of Henry Farny: A Retrospective, exh. Cat. (Santa Fe, N.M.: Gerald P. Peters Gallery, 1981); and Carter, in which Crossing the Continent–The First Train is reproduced on p. 48.}}

Whereas Frederic Remington identified with Indian fighters and cowboys, Farny preferred to depict Indians. He rightly viewed them as a people apart and he heightened that sense of psychological distance in his art. His respect for the Indians is evident in his avoidance of action-filled scenes, the conflicts between cowboy and Indian that were already settling into the national mythology. Instead, he chose to show dignified Indians in tranquil landscapes. These landscapes were a major contribution to Western art: accurate and detailed, they provide a comprehensive setting usually ignored by Remington and Charles M. Russell.  

Farny learned Indian languages and was adopted by three tribes—the Zuni, the Blackfoot, and the Sioux. The Blackfoot gave him the apt name Somaksodakepe, “The Bull That Stoops And Looks Around,” and the Sioux, in addition to a name, gave him a symbol of a dot within a circle, which he thereafter appended to his signature on paintings.       

The symbol is found on this vivid but somber gouache, Crossing the Continent—The First Train, which is otherwise an unusual work in Farny’s oeuvre. While most of Farny’s Indians are represented as if still living on the unfenced plains, that was a romantic fiction after the mid-1870s. The demands of commerce and ideology—the transcontinental railroad and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that supported it—resulted in a permanent and deadly change in national Indian policy. The extension of the railroads and therefore of cattle country led to the near extinction of the buffalo and the fragmentation of the territories of the Plains Indians. The treaties of 1867 and the Indian Wars that followed resulted in the relocation and crowding of Indians onto reservations—they became wards of the nation, supervised by government agents. “By 1881 many Indians were confined to reservations and were a melancholic, even pathetic group,” a fact painfully at odds with Farny’s usual romantic vision.^{2_{Appleton and Bartalini, 12.}}

Crossing the Continent resulted from an invitation to Farny to attend the ceremony marking the completion of the Northern Pacific Transcontinental Railroad. Henry Villard, President of the Northern Pacific, issued the invitation, and, in early September 1883, the party went to Missoula, Montana. Nearby, at a spot dubbed Golden Spike, the line of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company was connected to that of the Northern Pacific.^{3_{The title of Farny’s gouache implies that this is the first transcontinental railroad; the first, however, had been completed in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah.}} Back in Cincinnati by month’s end, Farny painted works inspired by the occasion. It is clear that he understood the grievous effect of this historic moment upon the Indians. There is ironic as well as pictorial point to the contrast of the engine and coach lights with the warm, salmon-tinted glow of the early evening sky. The train lights seem a harbinger of the advance of white progress and the sky an omen of the twilight of Indian civilization.

The track bisects the scene with finality, separating the Indian encampment above from the Chinese railway workers in their camp below. A railroad official watching the approaching train is the only figure that bridges the two zones. The two mounted Indians in the lower right corner are downcast. The nearer of them is hunched over in his saddle, wrapped in a blanket, perhaps made of sacking, which is stamped “U.S.I.D.”—for United States Interior Department, under which Indian Affairs were managed.^{4_{Conversations with several authorities at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives have confirmed that official designations were loosely used in the 19th century. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was often referred to as the Indian Department. It is unlikely that such casual usage extended to the printed or stenciled initials on boxes or bags, however. Given Farny’s frequent use of his own photographs in plotting his compositions, we may assume that the Interior Department is intended in this case.}} It is as if he wears a prison uniform. Farny also displays a sardonic awareness of the class disparity, defined by white men, between the beleaguered Indians, who yet stand with their tepees against the sky, and the Chinese—hired labor whose meaner tents lie in shadow on low ground.

Henry Francois Farny was born in Ribeauville, France, and brought to America by his family, who sought to find refuge from the oppression of the Second Empire following the revolutions of 1848. Settling first in the forests of northwestern Pennsylvania, in 1859, they moved to cosmopolitan Cincinnati, a center of art and, incidentally, lithography, the medium by which Henry entered the world of illustration. He moved to New York in 1866 to work for Harper’s Weekly and contributed to Harper’s for thirty years, while he pursued his personal work.       

Two periods of art study in Europe (1867–1870 and 1873–1874) gave him a technique and a bent for landscape painting, especially the descriptive realism practiced in Düsseldorf. The more painterly style practiced in Munich held less appeal for him, although it was there that he met another Cincinnati artist, Frank Duveneck, and the two became friends. Back home again, Farny became the principal illustrator of the McGuffey Readers. At the same time, he began to search for a worthy artistic sphere in which to exercise his talents and improve his fortunes.That sphere proved to be the West and its Indians, and within it Farny produced a substantial body of art and illustration whose worth becomes increasingly clear.

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.