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."The woman in front has her papoose. It is hung to the saddle bow by a strip of buckskin. The child is attached to the board and secured by buckskin highly ornamented and laced in front. If any one thing gives an Indian woman pleasure, above another, it must be the elaboration of this affair. Porcupine quills stained with all manner of colours, quite indelible, and of beautiful patterns, are carried down and across the front; now if she can procure some small bells to fasten on the guard piece of the head, the arrangement is almost complete." 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.