American Art Collaborative

"From the elevated rock in the foreground, from whence the sketch was taken, a wide expanse of land, declining gently to the margin of the Lake, spreads out before you , broken up with groups of trees. To the left the rocks rise abruptly from the bosom of the Lake, and behind these rocks a junction takes place with the Lake:- to the North of this. The peak covered with snow in the distance to the left of the sketch is the highest of this range,- probably not less than 15,000 feet above the prairie. Silence reigned supreme over this beautiful sheet of water, only as long intervals broken by the descent of an avalance, crashing through the trees and amongst the rocks." 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.