American Art Collaborative

Chimney Rock, along the Platte River, is one of the first unusual formations that Miller saw. A remarkable column approximately 150 feet high when he saw it, the rock is made of clay with strata of rock running through it. In his novel "Edward Warren" (pp. 155-156), Stewart commented that the rock, "seen in the mists occasioned by the evaporation of a wet region around, represents Parthenons and Acropolises, fortifications or cathedrals..." The column has deteriorated today, but is still a prominent landmark, a recognizable remnant of an earlier era. 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.