American Art Collaborative

"This was about the best specimen we came across of the women belonging to the Aricara tribe, which has dwindled into a small nation from war and other causes. The subject of the sketch was admired by the trappers, - of a rich bronze complexion, with long hair streaming over her shoulders, and extremely glossy from the constant use of Buffalo and bear oil." 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.