In 1837, the Scottish nobleman Captain William Drummond Stewart invited Alfred Jacob Miller to accompany him as the expedition artist on his journey along the Oregon Trail. The journey would take them to the annual rendezvous of fur trappers and traders at Horse Creek, near the banks of the Green River. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Miller studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1833 and spent time copying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. After traveling through Italy, Miller returned to Baltimore the following year to earn a living as a portrait painter. In late 1836, he left his native city for New Orleans, where he met Stewart, the man who would change the course of his career.

By joining Stewart’s expedition, Miller received the opportunity to travel further on the Oregon Trail than any artist had at that point, allowing him to paint previously unknown subjects and scenery. The American frontier was a continuously changing environment, and several scenes and events that Miller recorded in 1837 had disappeared by the time other artists followed in his footsteps. For example, Miller’s paintings of Fort Laramie record the original wooden structure that was torn down in 1840 and replaced by a new adobe building the next year. The drawings and watercolors that Miller produced while on the trail and afterwards provide rare glimpses into the life of the American Indian and the events that occurred on the American frontier during that period.

In order to provide his patron with a comprehensive pictorial record of the 1837 journey, Miller constantly observed and sketched the day-to-day life of the trappers and Indians that the caravan encountered. Theses sketches and the life experiences Miller had while on the Oregon Trail provided him with a lifetime of source material for the oil paintings he completed upon his return. Able to blend his first-hand accounts of the 1837 expedition with his idealized romantic tendencies from his academic training, Miller created an oeuvre that provides viewers today with a rare window into this moment of the American frontier.

On the trail Miller encountered Indians with cougar pelts, and learned first hand of the preciousness of these skins. According to Miller’s own account, “the Indians set a high value on his (the Cougar’s) beautiful hide, in a superstitious view, as grand ‘medicine,’ and in a particular view, as an elegant quiver for arrows, nothing will induce them to part with an acquisition of this kind. They formed certainly the finest article that came under our view;- but we failed entirely in our trails to purchase one.” Unable to acquire an actual pelt, Miller captured this beautiful and enigmatic creature in oil instead, immortalizing a memory from his travels and owning it in the only way he could.