American Art Collaborative

"The avenger is behind and no house of refuge for the offender. The disgrace to the poor devil in advance is not the act of stealing; his misfortune is in having been detected. The Snakes and Crows being in close proximity, near the Rocky Mountains, are in frequent collision, and of course do each other as much harm as possible." 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.