The last documented sale of an original Forsyth set is a copy of his Glacier Park collection, sold to the Falls City Public Library in December 1919,[1] but upon studying the negatives and contact sheets now held at archives in Montana and California it becomes clear that Forsyth had ceased adding to his sets six years earlier. With the waning popularity of stereographs, it was no longer commercially viable for what was essentially a one-man enterprise to continue, and Forsyth opted to focus on his work as a tour guide, and as a canvasser for Underwood & Underwood, to whom he also sold many of his own negatives.
In 1914 the Butte City Directory listed Forsyth as a travel agent for the first time in a decade,[2] and beyond 1917 he is not listed in it at all. This coincides with the arrival in Butte from Nebraska of his old friend Wilber G. Squires. The Squires’ homes in Butte, and later in Apex and Dillon, would become Forsyth’s residences in Montana for the next 30 years, though he would maintain a post office box in the city for business purposes until at least 1928.[3] He had similar arrangements in Nebraska, with Squires’ sister Marilla Larson in Plainview, and with the Forsyths’ second adopted son Frank Birch in Norfolk. From these bases he would tour schools and libraries, visiting established and potential customers with the latest Underwood & Underwood catalogues.
In February 1921 Underwood & Underwood sold its entire stereoscopic line to its only surviving rival The Keystone View Company.[4] Among the negatives sold were many taken by Forsyth a decade earlier, but Keystone had little interest in republishing them. In 1963 Keystone itself was purchased by the Mast Development Company of Davenport, Iowa, which in 1978 donated its inherited inventory of negatives to the UCR/California Museum of Photography at the University of California Riverside, where they are now known as the Keystone-Mast Collection.
Forsyth later wrote “Underwood sold out their business and me with it”,[5] but the change had little material impact. He retained Montana, Nebraska and Wyoming as his sales territories,[6] and for the next quarter of a century he continued to traverse the landscape that had so beguiled him as a young man, leaving scant trace of his movements beyond occasional hotel notices and transactions buried in school district purchase ledgers. Even with these sources, there are years-long periods where no record of him at all can be found.
In the 1920s, Forsyth sold the remainder of his glass-plate negatives to a newly established Butte photographer, Charles Owen Smithers. For 60 years they sat in storage, during which time many of them suffered irreparable damage. In 1986 Smithers’ son sold the surviving 530 negatives to an antiques dealer in California, and after passing through several hands they were eventually bought at auction in 2003 by the Autry Museum of the American West. Another 100 negatives are held at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, as part of the C. Owen Smithers Collection.
In April 1940, Forsyth appeared in the U.S. Federal census for the first time since 1910, listed as a 71 year-old salesman staying at the Hotel Hartington, Cedar County, Nebraska. The census lists his home as Norfolk, Nebraska. Between 1917 and 1935, he would use Norfolk and Butte interchangeably as his official residences while conducting business.
By 1935 Wilber G. Squires had relocated to Dillon,[7] where his adult son Wilber L. Squires would eventually build a home for his own young family, including an additional room for “Uncle Normy”.[8] Thereafter, Forsyth would list Dillon as his official residence in Montana, though he remained nomadic at heart. In October 1947 he spent two weeks as an inpatient at the Murray Hospital in Butte,[9] but the following year the 79 year-old could still be found conducting business for Keystone in Nebraska.[10]
In November 1949, Forsyth was interviewed by Edwin Townsend, the editor of The Dillon Daily Tribune, about his time with C.M. Russell at the bison roundup 40 years earlier.[11] Townsend would later recall a conversation that took place that day, during which Forsyth asked him to write his obituary:
“I smiled and said ‘You will probably live longer than I.’ I noticed a thoughtful expression come over Uncle Normy’s face as he answered in a soft voice, ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’”[12]
Forsyth passed away at the Squires home just six weeks later, on December 15th, 1949. In a hugely affectionate obituary, Edwin Townsend speculated that Forsyth had a premonition of his death, but the truth is more prosaic. He had been diagnosed with kidney cancer two years earlier,[13] which corresponds with his stay at the Murray Hospital in 1947. Forsyth was interred in the Squires’ family plot at the Mountain View Cemetery in Dillon on December 17th, 1949.
In 1943, six years before Forsyth’s death, the Work Projects Administration published “Copper Camp: Stories of the World’s Greatest Mining Town.”[14] Among many illustrations are three produced from negatives Forsyth had donated to C. Owen Smithers twenty years earlier. In each case Smithers is credited as the photographer, including Forsyth’s 1903 photograph of F. Augustus Heinze’s speech at the Silver Bow Court House, taken when Smithers was 10 years old. This set a pattern that would play out repeatedly in the years following Forsyth’s death, and continues to do so. In 1974, Mission Valley News of St. Ignatius published a 40-page pamphlet about the Pablo roundup – “Qua Quei, or How the Buffalo Were Saved”.[15] It was illustrated entirely with images from Forsyth’s Roundup set, but Forsyth himself does not receive a single mention. In 2013, the Drumlummon Institute published Nicholas Vrooman’s masterful 500-page “The Whole Country was … ‘One Robe’”, which contains at least one Forsyth image that has been credited to his friend F.E. Peeso.[16] These are just a few examples of the fate of Forsyth’s work over the last eighty years. It is likely that these publishers were simply unaware of the images’ provenance; beyond the world of stereograph enthusiasts, he remains an obscure figure. But if we combine the sets and individual cards currently held in private collections and museums across the country with the negatives and contact sheets languishing in far-flung archives, there are over a thousand extant Forsyth stereoviews of Montana – an unparalleled photographic record of the state in the first decade of the 20th century, and a legacy worthy of long-overdue recognition.
[1] “At The Library,” Falls City Daily News, Falls City, (NE), Dec. 6, 1919
[2] Butte, Montana, City Directory, 1914, R.L. Polk & Company
[3] The Nebraska Educational Journal, Nebraska State Teachers Association, (NE), 1928
[4] “Sells Stereoscopic Line,” The Ottawa Herald, Ottawa, (KS), Feb. 12, 1921
[5] Letter from Forsyth to Mr. Hamilton, Jul. 30, 1949
[6] Letter from Forsyth to Mr. Hamilton, Jul. 30, 1949
[7] United States Federal Census: Dillon, Beaverhead, Montana, Apr. 1, 1940
[8] “Chats with Your Editor,” The Dillon Daily Tribune, Dillon, (MT), Dec. 19, 1949
[9] “Hospital Notes,” The Montana Standard, Butte (MT), Oct. 22, 1947
[10] “The News In Brief,” The Beatrice Times, Beatrice, (NE), Mar. 6, 1948
[11] “Dillon Man Tells Story Of Riding Wild Buffalo Which His Friend Charles Russell Painted,” The Dillon Daily Tribune, Dillon, (MT), Nov. 9, 1949
[12] “Chats with Your Editor,” The Dillon Daily Tribune, Dillon, (MT), Dec. 19, 1949
[13] State of Montana, Montana Death Index, 1868-2015
[14] “Copper Camp: Stories of the World’s Greatest Mining Town, Butte, Montana,” Workers of the Writers’ Program if the Work Projects Administration in the State of Monta, Hastings House, New York, 1945.
[15] “Qua Que, or How the Buffalo Were Saved,” Jim Jennings, Mission Valley News, St. Ignatius, (MT), Jan. 1 1974
[16] “The Whole Country was … ‘One Robe’,” Nicholas C.P. Vrooman, Drumlummon Institute, Helena, (MT), Jan. 30, 2013, p. 270. The image titled “Raising of the Thunder Pole” was originally published in Forsyth’s “Montana Indians Through the Stereoscope” set as “Kootenai’s Raising Sun Dance Lodge, Camas”.