Miller saw Fort Laramie at its height. The rendezvous system provided it with a thriving business and a near monopoly on the buffalo trade until 1841 when former army officer Lancaster Lupton established a rival trading post, Fort Platte, about a mile away. That same year Sublette sold Fort Laramie to the American Fur Company which replaced the small, wooden structure with a larger, adobe walled structure which they named Fort John.
Each spring caravans from St. Louis arrived at the fort with trade goods, and various Indian tribes, especially the Lakota (Sioux), exchanged their tanned buffalo robes for a variety of manufactured goods. In the fall, traders shipped tons of buffalo hides and other furs from the post. By the 1840s, however, fashions had changed and beaver pelts and buffalo hides became scarcer. By then, the fort played host to tens of thousands of emigrants bound for Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley, and the traders did a brisk seasonal business providing for their needs.(Unruh, 1979; McChristian, 2009).
This watercolor might have been a part of the thirty-seven that Miller did for William C. Wait in 1848, but this group has not been positively identified (Ross, 1968, p. xxxv).
Ron Tyler
