American Art Collaborative

The principal lodge, says Miller, is sixty to seventy feet in diameter with a domelike roof perhaps forty feet high in the center. The only light comes through a six-foot aperture at the top, which also permits the smoke to escape. Miller compared the whole effect to the Pantheon at Rome. 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.