American Art Collaborative

"About half an hour before the halt for evening, scouts are sent out in advance of the main body, in order to reconnoitre and select a spot combining the requisites for an encampment:- as the wagons and charettes approach the location, they take a circuitous course, and by the time the last vehicle has reached the ground, the Caravan has formed a circumference of 5 or 600 feet;- the horses and mules are now unharnessed, and loosed to feed, leaving the vehicles at a dinstance of some 30 feet apart, forming a species of barricade; towards sundown the horses are driven in and picketed, and this scene forms the subject of our sketch. Most extensive cookery ensues, and the prairie forms the only table available for the viands." 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.