American Art Collaborative

"The subject of the sketch is a half-breed (that is, his father was a Canadian, his mother an Indian) and one of the noblest specimiens of a Western hunter; - in the outward journey he killed for us about 120 Buffalo; his temper however, when aroused, was uncontrollable." 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.