Crazy Crow Trading Post offers this list of Frontier Online Pictorials & Photo Resources and other related links to help you in your search for information about the early American frontier and fur trade era. Inclusion in this list does not represent an endorsement by Crazy Crow, although we do try to be selective – and reserve the right to do so.

THE ILLUSTRATING TRAVELER: ADVENTURE AND ILLUSTRATION IN NORTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN 1760-1895

The travel narrative is one of the earliest and most enduring of literary genres. From the Odyssey onward, the interest of the public in hearing tales of foreign places, and the desire of the traveler to tell them, have never wavered. Through their words of description writers tried to provide their readers with pictures of places and things seen. Early travel narratives very seldom contained accurate illustrations; pictures were generally included for decoration, not illustration and readers relied on the verbal text for information.

This exhibition displays illustrated traveler’s narratives and original art by travelers from the later 18th to the late 19th century. Geographically it covers travelers to North America in its broadest sense, from the high Arctic to the Caribbean. In almost every item shown, the printed images are based on original artwork by either the author or an artist connected with a larger expedition or team which included the narrative’s author. The show is arranged in six broad thematic categories, which try to illuminate some of the variety and richness the illustrating travelers brought to their work. Each section has been divided into three WWW pages to reduce the time required to load them.

An Artist and the Fur Trade: the Wyoming Paintings of Alfred Jacob Miller

In April 1837, a distinguished gentleman entered the newly opened studio of a young artist at 26 Chartres Street in New Orleans. He lingered over a large painting of the city of Baltimore—the artist’s hometown—and offered a scant compliment before leaving. A few days later, William Drummond Stewart, a wealthy Scot, returned to hire Alfred Jacob Miller as expedition artist for a journey into the Rocky Mountains of the vast American West. Their destination was the rendezvous of 1837. In a general sense, the French word rendezvous means “meeting.” The rendezvous was a three-week hook-up of fur trappers, Indians, fur company traders and a few opportunistic adventurers such as Stewart. At the confluence of the Green River and Horse Creek, near today’s town of Pinedale, Wyo., Indians and mountain men eagerly traded beaver pelts and buffalo robes for rifles and traps, blankets, trinkets, food and supplies, and spiced-up, watered-down alcohol.

Miller completed more than 200 field sketches in pencil and watercolor. Besides scenes of the trip, Miller illustrated Stewart’s exploits, including some he didn’t witness and even some that undoubtedly never occurred. Capt. Stewart was a veteran of four previous rendezvous and the Napoleonic Wars. He is easily identified in Miller’s pictures by his hooked nose, fringed buckskin coat and magnificent white horse. Alfred Jacob Miller never returned to the Wind River country nor witnessed another rendezvous. He completed the bulk of his assignment in 1841 as Stewart’s guest at Murthly.

Fur Traders and Rendezvous: The Alfred Jacob Miller Online Catalogue

The Ricketts Art Foundation, The Buffalo Bill Center of The West, and the Museum of the Mountain Man proudly present Fur Traders and Rendezvous: The Alfred Jacob Miller Online Catalogue, the most extensive online collection of Miller’s paintings from his 1837 trip west. In the early part of the Nineteenth Century, fur traders, Indians, pioneers, and adventurers who journeyed west of the Mississippi experienced a raw and rugged world now mostly forgotten. We are fortunate, however, that those experiences were captured vividly on canvas by the American artist Alfred Jacob Miller, who ventured west to the American Rocky Mountains in 1837. Miller painted what he saw on that trip, and his firsthand works provide a window into a life and time long gone but essential to the very nature of what it is to be American.

George Catlin – National Gallery of Art

George Catlin is best known as a painter of the American Indians. After seeing a delegation of Plains Indians in Philadelphia, he decided to dedicate his life to recording the lives and customs of Native Americans. Soon after completing law school, Catlin became a professional artist. He traveled extensively throughout North America in the 1830s and he visited South America in the 1850s, painting hundreds of Indians and keeping detailed records of his journeys. The National Gallery has more than 350 paintings by Catlin in its collection. Following his extensive travels, Catlin put his paintings on view in an exhibition he called The Indian Gallery.

Travels in the Interior of North America: Maximillian’s Atlas by Karl Bodmer

Comprising the series of original paintings to illustrate the text, by Karl Bodmer. This link takes you to The American Mountain Man Association web page where they have directly linked to several of these images in various museums & libraries.

Mountain Man Photos & Portraits

Gallery of 16 images, including: Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith & Kit Carson. This link takes you to The American Mountain Man Association web page where they have created this gallery.

48 Snapshots Of Life In The Real Wild West

By Mark Oliver | Edited By John Kuroski; Published April 25, 2017, Updated March 25, 2021. These authentic vintage photographs of the American frontier reveal what life was actually like in the “Wild West.” The American frontier holds a mythic space in our imaginations. And because of that, it’s a place we envision more through the stories of the Wild West than through its actual history. The real American frontier wasn’t always as dramatic as it’s made out to be in films, but it was a dangerous place, an untamed land. The settlers who traveled out West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to live in defiance of nature and the elements without the comforts of civilization. Whole families would gather together in wagons and ride off into the unknown, sometimes spending months living in the carriages that pulled them westward. Men, women, and children alike would endure as they crossed over mountains, across rivers, and through deserts in search of a new home and a better life. When they arrived, they lived in houses built with their own two hands. They had to fend for water and food on their own and set up the very infrastructures of their new towns. Some made their way by working on ranches and farms, others by trapping and trading fur, and some by toiling deep in the mines of the new American frontier.