Farny, Henry

Henry Farny’s romantic notions of the noble savage were tempered by his encounters with real Indians when he and his family emigrated to America from France. Exploited and ignored, the Indians Farny met in the West made him rail against the official policy of forced resettlement, barren reservations and inadequate rationing. Farny’s progressive, egalitarian stance towards Native Americans and his sympathies with their plight inform his work, which sought to depict Native Americans without added romance, going about their lives and moving through a rapidly changing world. The Garrards have a distinguished ancestor in Lewis Hector Garrard whose book, Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail is an eyewitness account of the Taos Revolt in 1846-47 and the subsequent trials of the rebels, whose death sentences Garrard saw as unjust.

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