Wounded Buffalo

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

"The hunters have detached a buffalo from the main band, wounded him, and he is down on his haunches, by no means conquered - He is gathering up his energies for a final struggle with his unrelenting pursuers - hunters and horses both being on the alert, keeping a chary distance and watchful eye. Once more on his feet, his onset from his great weight (about 2,500 pounds) is terrible, but he strikes now, as the boxers have it, 'all abroad,' being blinded with rage and pain. All will not do, the cunning of man is too much for him,- while he is furiously attacking on party, another with a well-aimed ball strikes a fatal part, which brings him heavily down, bellowing loud enough to wake Morpheus himself - his defiant eye glaring to the last, and seemingly to ask no quarter. In the middle the retreaters are chasing the retreating band, it is impossible to resist the excitement, and all go in pell-mell. A portion of the Wind River shain of mountains looms up in the distance - the tops covered with snow so dazzling that they eye can scarcely bear its brilliancy." 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.

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Provenance

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

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