American Art Collaborative

"August, a half-breed Canadian, who is here represented watering his horse, was one amongst the best of all our mountain men, with a lithe and active form, exuberant spirits, quick percption - especially of the ridiculous, - and brave to recklessness; he was the life of the Camp, from his excessive drollery and bon homie." 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.