Between 1859, when he left the East for St. Louis to join Frederick W. Lander's expedition to lay out an overland wagon route from Fort Laramie across the Rockies to the Pacific coast, and about 1890, Bierstadt made numerous trips to explore and sketch such rugged places as the Rockies, the Sierra, and Yosemite Valley. Bierstadt sketched in the wilderness and, when he returned periodically to his Eastern studios, he transformed his sketches into grand-scale majestic paintings that became very popular in mid-19th century America and Europe. Because of the relatively small scale and the Eastern landscape appearance of this work, it is believed to date fairly late in Bierstadt's career, sometime between the 1870s and the 1890s. Bierstadt's continuing interests in naturalistic detail and luminous, reflected light and atmosphere, are still very much in evidence in this exquisite work.