American Art Collaborative

"We reached this point about sunset on our way to the Lakes, and from fatigue rested here for the night; it gave me ample time to obtain a sketch from the bluff rock to the left, which completely overlooked one of the Lakes, the object of our pilgrimage. Solitude brooded over the scene, and with the exception of our party, the eye wandered in vain to discover a living being, or a sign of habitation... The rays of the declining sun glimmered on the distant tops of the snow-covered peaks, while darkness had already begun to cast its pall on the valley below,- the air becoming sensibly colder as the night advanced. In the gorge or pass at the foot of the rock, our men were engaged in building a huge bonfire, singing, chansons d'amour, and waiting for François and his mule to bring along the mountain sheep our hunters had secured;- for it must be confessed, that hunger too the pas of natural scenery with all its charms,- sometimes!" 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.