American Art Collaborative

"The sketch represents the interior of a Lodge and the Snake Indian entertaining a free Trapper at a feast. The latter is engaged in recounting some adventure to his host, partly by his limited knowledge of the Indian Language, and by signs. To the right is seated an Indian woman who watches his every movement with intense interest;- she has no doubt often heard of the extravagant generosity of these reckless follows, and worships him accordingly." 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.