American Art Collaborative

"The scene of action is near the cut rocks. An Indian on a well-trained horse has separated a Buffalo from the herd and is about to have a shot at him, others are going pell-mell after the tretreating herd among the hills in the background. In the immediate foreground is a horse unaccustomed to the chase, frightened at the unweieldly brute's noise and confusion about him. The prairie is admirably adopted to these hunts, from its level surface,- freedom from bogs, quicksand, and interruptions of any kind. Hunters of the fox in civilized life would consider this hard work,- indeed to make a successful hunter of these huge brutes requires long practice both of men & horses, and is always attended with more or less danger." 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.