Moran produced the painting in 1872 following his participation the previous summer in Ferdinand V. Hayden’s geological survey of the Yellowstone region, the first scientific expedition to systematically document the area. Moran traveled with the survey from July through August 1871, sketching alongside photographer William Henry Jackson. The watercolors and field studies he brought back, together with Jackson’s photographs, were circulated to members of Congress and helped persuade legislators to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in March 1872. Moran completed the large oil shortly after, working in his Newark studio. Congress purchased it that same year for $10,000.

Thomas Moran (1837–1926), English-born and trained partly through engraving and illustration work for Scribner’s Monthly, built his career on western subjects after this Yellowstone trip, producing companion canvases of the Chasm of the Colorado (1873–74) and the Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875). The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone hung for decades in the U.S. Capitol before being transferred to the Department of the Interior and ultimately to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it remains. Though it post-dates the Lewis and Clark Expedition by nearly seven decades, the painting belongs to the broader visual tradition that translated the upper Missouri and Yellowstone country—territory Clark’s party traversed in 1806—into a national iconography, and it is frequently cited in scholarship on the artistic afterlife of the Corps of Discovery’s route.

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The painting dates from 1882, well after Moran had established his reputation through the large exhibition canvases that followed his 1871 trip to Yellowstone with the Hayden Survey and his 1873 trip to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado with John Wesley Powell. By the early 1880s he was producing smaller, more intimate oils drawn from his accumulated Western sketches, often reworking motifs from earlier field studies for the eastern art market. American interest in the Colorado Plateau and the high desert country remained strong, fed by railroad promotion, government survey reports, and the kind of imagery Moran himself had helped create.

Moran (1837–1926), English-born and Philadelphia-trained, was the painter most responsible for shaping the eastern public’s mental picture of the interior West, and his Yellowstone and Colorado canvases were directly cited in the congressional debates that produced the first national parks. While this painting does not depict a Lewis and Clark site — the Corps of Discovery did not reach the Colorado drainage — Moran’s body of work belongs to the broader nineteenth-century project of visualizing the trans-Mississippi West that Lewis and Clark’s journals initiated. The canvas is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., which holds one of the largest institutional collections of Moran’s oils and watercolors, much of it acquired from the artist’s estate and later gifts.

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