American Art Collaborative

"The hunters have here encountered a large band of Elk, and are sallying out from their ambush to shoot them as they pass. At certain seasons it is quite usual to find them in herds of severl hundreds coming down from the mountains and flying en masse over the plain to reach the vicinity of streams or rivers." 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.