Send an ecard of this image

Bards of the Great Plains

Today is the annual Dakota Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Medora, North Dakota.

During the cattle drives of the 1800s, cowboys used to sing songs and recite stories and poetry by campfires. Cowboy poetry gatherings help to keep this little-known tradition alive and well today.

Telling tales is the subject of today's idyllic watercolor by Henry Farny. During the 1880s, when Plains Indians and white men met to swap lies (or boast of their prowess in hunting and war), the encounters were usually less friendly than the one depicted here by Henry Farny, a leading illustrator of the American West. But Farny rarely emphasized the sometimes open hostility between the two races; he preferred instead to paint Indian life with a more detached view, suggested by the studied relationship of the two figures in the foreground and the almost Arcadian circumstances that surround them. In his own day, Farny was praised for his realistic scenes of Indian life, but now we see them as subject to a strong period sentiment for recording what was thought to be a vanishing race.

Source: William Truettner. (Curatorial files, Smithsonian American Art Museum, November 1986).

Pictured: Henry F. Farny, 1847 France–1916 USA, Swapping Lies, 1906, watercolor and gouache on paper, 9 15/16 x 17 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. Boyce George Eidson.