Stewart is shown in this painting (a rare occurrence in the Walters commission) entertaining a group of Indian chiefs and smoking the pipe with them. Various other activities are taking place in the valley below—gambling, games such as ball playing, perhaps some races. Miller commented that the Company tried to keep the Indians engaged in such contests to keep them from coming up with other kinds of “mischief.”
Miller copied many of his early sketches to fill William T. Walters’s commission for two hundred watercolors in 1858 – 1859, in this case his earlier versions of Indian Encampment near the Wind River Mountains (CR #170) and Pipe of Peace at the Rendezvous (CR #170A). This is a much calmer scene and the familiar striped tent is missing, but the camp still appears to be on a cliff rather than the bluff that Miller painted in his sketch and, as with others of the Walters commission, the more studied composition has resulted in a distancing of the middle and backgrounds and a lack of spontaneity. (CR #170).
