Unlike most of the artists who visited Colorado during the mid-1800s, Whittredge preferred the plains to the Rockies. “I had never seen the plains or anything like them,” he exclaimed after his first trip to the region in 1866. “They impressed me deeply. I cared more for them than for the mountains.”

Traveling along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains in 1866 and again in 1870, Whittredge paid special attention to the rivers and streams that cut through the prairie landscape, and he returned home with numerous studies of shorelines, cottonwoods, and shallow marshes, along with a few views of the nearby mountains. Back in his New York studio, he translated these works into studio paintings such as this one, the largest of his western landscapes.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023).