At some point in 1883, Henry Farny and Reporter/Editor Eugene V. Smalley, both working for the Century Magazine, among other pursuits, began planning for an 1884 trip down the Missouri, specifically between the Gate of the Mountains near Helena Montana to Fort Benton, a distance of 130 miles by car. They hired experienced guide Harry Wheeler to take them.
In often repeated biographies, sometimes this Missouri event is stated to have occurred in 1878 and involved a thousand-mile canoe journey down the Missouri, but neither are true. But, there are multiple reporter accounts of the trip to prove that the trip unfolded differently.
By the time they climbed into the two boats an early Tuesday morning, September 16th, 1884, Farny and Smalley were reading disembark, as they’d had to wait a day due to rain. The reporter and the artist climbed into the boat, along with a local report from Helena and a visitor from California. Meanwhile, the other boat, captain by guide Harry Wheeler, was larger and carried a total of eight people. Without going into all the details, Farny and Smalley’s boat floated about 80 miles of the river, then, after tiring of heaving oar work, they traveled overland in a wagon for a good portion of the rest of the trip. Along the way, Farny used an “instantaneous camera” rather than attempt to sketch everything, something he often did on trips, such as the 1881 Fort Yates trip where he took 120 photos and the 1883 NP trip, where fellow travelers poked fun at him for missing out on a photo in Puyallup, Washington.
Farny and Smalley floated into Fort Benton late Sunday night after dark. After a couple of days there, they grabbed a stage and went overland to Billings. Somehow, from there, Farny ended up in Colorado with F. W. Shanks, a reporter out of Cincinnati. What they were doing in the Colorado region isn’t clear, but it seems they spent one to two weeks there.
Though the Montana trip with Smalley took place in 1884, Smalley’s article and Farny’s eighteen illustrations didn’t appear in The Century Magazine until January of 1881: The Upper Missouri and the Great Falls, Eugene V. Smalley, Century Magazine, Vol XXXV, No. 3, pg408-418. Here are the results:
Regarding the last image, Both Denny Carter (pg 51) and Susan Meyn (pg55) document a painting Farny competed, with the same name, but undated, that looks near identical to the Piegan Camp illustration. There seems to be coloring differences, but beyond they are quite similar.
