American Art Collaborative

"It is a lucky circumstance for Trappers and adventurers in the mountains that this animal [the Cougar] is somewhat rare. He is of the genus feline and as treacherous as he is graceful in his movements. His favorite mode of attack is to lie hidden in the branches of a tree, or amidst some bushes on a over-hanging rock, - pouncing on his prey at a single bound as it passes underneath, or near enough to his place of concealment. ... The sketch will convey an idea of the Cougar's stealthy atttack, an the reception he meets from a self-possessed and wily mountaineer." 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.