American Art Collaborative

"In a large company of men, horses, wagons and equipments, the crossing of rivers is quite an undertaking and, if deep, involving considerable risk and damage. The company's good and the produce must be kept dry at all hazards. In the first place guides are sent out to cross and explore the river at different points, in order to find the best places for embarking and landing, and when the river is deep, the goods must be all unladen from about 30 wagons and charettes, transferred to boats, and ferried across."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.