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Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference. When the river was too deep to permit the wagons to cross, the Conestoga wagons were stripped and buffalo hides were wrapped around them. All the goods and equiptment were loaded into them, beginning with the ten-gallon barrels of alcohol (which had been slipped by the authorities, it being illegal to take alcohol to the Indians), and floated across the river. The carts were emptied and floated across on their own. This was a time-consuming process to be avoided if at all possible. 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.