American Art Collaborative

The Green River of Wyoming (Oregon Territory to Miller) winds through spectacular mountains to join the Colorado River. Miller trekked through the Rockies for one season and noted many difficulties, especially for those who tried to climb the highest peaks, only to experience "giddiness and headache, attended with vomiting," and turn back. He has included a camp of Indians en route to the rendezvous near the shore of what might well be Frémont Lake, a romantic touch emphasizing the harmony between unspoiled nature and natural man. "The sun did not appear to shine so brightly to us the balance of the day," Miller recalls, lamenting the loss of one of his friends. 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.