Ask the Scholar

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."As tobacco is a scarce commodity with the Indians they have found a plant of a delicious flavor to mix with it and in default of the former to use in its stead, this is called 'Kinnick, Kinnick,' the leaves resembling in shape the box of the gardens, and is cured by a process similar to that for tobacco. With a good supply of this article he lays by for a time the deadly war club, and quiver of arrows, - fills his pipe bowl and inhales the fragrant mixture." 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.