The Pipe of Peace

Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference.

"The foreground presents a high bluff, where our Leader is engaged in conciliating some chiefs by making them presents, and smoking the Calumet. A carpet has been spread, and the chief is presenting a pipe already lighted;- this has a universal meaning amonst them, and signifies friendship and good will. Trappers are lazily lying about.- watching the animated scene on the prairie below, or mayhap gazing vacantly - while thinking of their humble homes in old 'Mis-sou-rye.' On the broad prairie beneath, bright Indian Lodges are scattered over the plain until they reach the mountain steeps. The natives are in groups engaged in their games & pastimes,- while some are breathing their horses, others are trafficking - ball playing &c. The great chain called the 'Mountain of Winds' closes the scene." 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.

Inscription

Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.

William T. Walters, Baltimore, 1858-1860, by commission; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.