American Art Collaborative

"The sketch represents an encampment of Shoshonee Indians, near Green River, Oregon. On the elevated ground, or bluff, are a group of Indians in painted robes. On the plain below they are preparing jerked meat, this is performed by cutting it up into thin slices and laying it on frame work, composed of crotched sticks supporting poles;- under these a suppressed fire is built, so as to smoke and dry it at the same time. Before we started from St. Louis we became acquainted with Capt. Sublette, who was then a substantial merchant in that city. He had been one of the pioneers to the 'Far West' and almost the first thing he did was to hand us a piece of this prepared meat so as to give us a foretaste of mountain life. He told us that every season he caused a bale of meat to be brought down to him which lasted 6 or 8 months. The Indians and Trappers, after having prepared it properly, fold it in smoked buckskin and stow it away either for Winter consumption, or as a provision in making journeys where game is scarce." 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.