American Art Collaborative

"When 3 or 4 hunters are together the shot (if valuable) is accorded to the best marksman, for a potent reason, that in this expedition more than 100 hungry men waited for the result and were not to be trifled with. You might have as much fun and jollity as you pleased, - but be sure and bring in the meat. Excuses do not pass current, - ravenous appetites having no reasoning power or sympathy with excuses." 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.