American Art Collaborative

The Indian custom, of course, called for the young man to pay the family of the girl he chose for his wife. But in this case, Miller says, the brave has only his horse and he does not want to give it up. So he slipped into the village when the other men were away hunting and persuaded the maiden to go with him. The old men mounted their horses and pursued the couple to the river but could not catch them. 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.