American Art Collaborative

"The sketch will do more than any words we can use in giving an idea of the sublimity and beauty of this scene,- to the left a solid immense rock rises sheer out of the water to a great height,- its dark grey shadow forming a striking contrast to the sharp-pinnacled snow-covered mountains in the distance. Our leader has caused two ankers of Brandy and Port Wine to be placed on a mule, and when we reached the borders of this charming Lake, it was resoved to christen them the same night. We are compelled to draw a slight veil over the proceedings. Suffice it to say, it was a time (as the Trappers style it) of 'High Jinks.'" 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.