Picketing Horses

"It is near sunset and the whole camp is very busy, the horses and mules have been driven in, and each man runs towards them as they come, secures his own horse, catches him by the lariat (a rope on the ground from his neck), and leads nim to a good bed of grass, where a picket is driven, and here he is secured for the night, the lariat permitting him to graze to the extent of a circle 25 feet in diameter, and all this is eaten down pretty close by morning. The grass is quite sufficient without any other provender to keep the animals in good condition, if the work given them to do is not too heavy, or if they are not compedlled to make forced marches. The selection of the Camp is of so much importance that scouts are sent out previous to the halt of the Caravan, whose duty it is to select sites combining above all things the two great requisites, an abundance of both water & grass." 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.