Deer by the River, Wyoming

In June 1837, Alfred Jacob Miller undertook his storied expedition to the American West, departing St. Louis for the Green River, in present day Wyoming, in the company of Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart. During his trip, Miller created over 150 preliminary sketches and watercolors, which he later used to generate finished compositions in both watercolor and oil—many in his studio on the grounds of Stewart’s ancestral home in Scotland. The subjects of these works were most frequently genre scenes of life in the American West, including depictions of fur trappers (including Stewart), Native Americans as well as the region’s landscape and natural inhabitants. Once settled back in his native Baltimore in 1842, Miller continued to complete works that catered to the young aristocracy of a new nation that was already transfixed by Romanticism. As Francis Flavin notes, “Miller’s paintings were dreamy, timeless, and quintessentially Romantic.” (“The Adventurer – Artists of the Nineteenth Century and the Image of the American Indian,” Indian Magazine of History, 2002, p. 1)

The present work depicts a passage along the Oregon Trail known as Devil's Gate, a unique rock formation located along the Sweetwater River in central Wyoming. The gorge is just a few miles away from the famed Oregon Trail pitstop Independence Rock, which became a national historic landmark in 1961. In Miller’s own recounting of the area, the artist wrote, “The traveller [sic] on his way to the South pass of the Rocky Mountains encounters this singular scene, about 5 miles beyond Independence Rock, where the Sweet Water has forced its way through a granite ridge. Col. Frémont, who seems to have measured it, thus described it.- 'The length of the passage is about 300 yards, and the width 35 yards. The walls of rock are vertical, and about 400 feet in height; and the stream in the gate is almost entirely choked up by masses which have fallen from above. In the wall on the right back is a dike of trap rock, cutting though a fine grey granite; near the point of the ridge crop out some Strata of the valley formation, consisting of a greyish sandstone and fine grey conglomerate and marl.' The sketch however will convey a better idea of the scene than any written description can possibly accomplish.” (as quoted in M. Ross, The West of Alfred Jacob Miller, Norman, Oklahoma, 1951, p. 164)

Related works on paper to the present example include Devil’s Gate (n.d., Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma); Devils Gate (n.d., Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska) and The “Devil’s Gate” (circa 1858-60, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland). Related oil paintings include Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater (n.d., Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas) and Hell-Gate, Sweet Water River (Porte d’Enfer), Wyoming (circa 1839, Private collection).