Ask the Scholar

In 1837, the Baltimore-born artist Alfred Jacob Miller accompanied Antoine Clement and his employer, the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart, on a journey to the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. Clement, whose mother had Native American (Cree) parentage and whose father was French Canadian, was a highly skilled hunter and helped find food for parties traveling to what was then the frontier of United States expansionist activity. He had journeyed with Stewart several times before, and later accompanied him to Europe and the Middle East, living with him for three years on his Scottish estate. Although the precise nature of Clement’s and Stewart’s relationshipis not clear, it was insinuated in contemporary sources that Stewart had several same-sex relationships with men over the course of his lifetime. Some of Stewart’s own published and private writing supports this idea.