The expeditionary artists who often accompanied military, survey, and fur trade expeditions left a vivid and colorful record of the Western frontier. George Catlin’s documentation of the manners and customs of the Mandans and more than forty other Indigenous communities preserved important historical and cultural information in a visual medium.
Expeditionary Artists of the American West
Seth Eastman, a career Army officer trained in art at West Point, was one of many nineteenth-century painters whose western experiences were furnished by the U. S. military. The Army was the single largest source of support for artists traveling in the West prior to the Civil War. As some of the first White American artists of the West, their work delivered illustrated reports to Congress on those expeditions, providing early visual records of the land and its people to Congress and the general public.
Alfred Jacob Miller was a struggling young portraitist in New Orleans when Scottish sportsman and adventurer Captain William Drummond Stewart invited him to record Stewart’s private expedition to the fur trappers’ rendezvous in the summer of 1837. Miller was one of the first White artists to paint in the Rockies and the only one to depict trappers from life during the heyday of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. His sketches of the journey over the Great Plains to the Wind River Mountains of present-day Wyoming are a unique record of mountain men and the Native Americans with whom they traded. In 1840, Miller traveled to Scotland, where he painted a series of monumental canvases of Stewart’s adventures in the West to decorate the spacious walls of the nobleman’s ancestral castle.
