American Art Collaborative

"The time represented in the sketch is early morning, and the Caravan has placed itself en route,- our old friends the Delawares as usual are delaying and inactive. These Delawares when William Penn landed in America were a strong and powerful nation, and received that distinguished man and his followers with open arms and a hearty welcome. They sat in Council and listened to his friendly tongue and soft speeches, when (if they had studied their own interst) they might have pitched then whole straight-coated fraternity into the River." 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.