American Art Collaborative

"The Indians have just driven the bear from his covert among some wild cherry bushes, which fruit is decidedly one of his weaknesses; of it he is remarkably fond. They are preparing to run him, giving him at the same time a wide berth, knowing very well the formidable qualities of the brute they have to deal with. As an arrow sometiems fails to pierce his body, owing to thick matted hair, they aim usually at the head, the most vulnerable part." 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.