Green River - Oregon

Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference. These words, which shaped how Miller’s contemporaries viewed the watercolors, reveal the racism and sexism embedded in 19th-century exploration and colonization of the western part of what is today the United States.

"This river has become famous as the great rendezvous of all expeditions to the Far West. Here the Fur Companies every year meet the Indians, who congregate from all quarters, and specimens of nearly all the tribes may be here seen about the month of August. The point from which the sketch is taken commands a distant view of the rendezvous, the white Lodges of which are seen on the brink of the river. From this place after all sales of Peltries are completed, the trappers set out on their Beaver hunt;- here also they provide themselves with 'Heaven's last, best gift, to man'- which is had for a 'consideration.'" 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.