American Art Collaborative

"In the wildest and most secluded haunts of the mountains, on high rocky peaks, these animlas [mountain sheep] are mostly found. They remain on the peaks all day long, and in the evening and early morning come down seeking water and grass. The meat in season is excellent, having a trifle more of the wild flavor than ours." A.J. Miller, extracted from "The West of Alfred Jacob Miller" (1837). 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.