American Art Collaborative

The men were tormented by thirst several times while crossing the prairie. It was not unusual in such a situation to see a delightful lake looming on the horizon. When the horses did not "quicken their motion, or snort," Miller knew that he was seeing a mirage. Although Miller is noted for the first pictures of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, he also painted some of the freshest and most candid prairie scenes to come out of the overland trail. In July 1858 William T. Walters commissioned 200 watercolors at twelve dollars apiece from Baltimore born artist Alfred Jacob Miller. These paintings were each accompanied by a descriptive text, and were delivered in installments over the next twenty-one months and ultimately were bound in three albums. Transcriptions of field-sketches drawn during the 1837 expedition that Miller had undertaken to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in the Green River Valley (in what is now western Wyoming), these watercolors are a unique record of the closing years of the western fur trade.