Mae Reed Porter and Clyde Porter Papers, 1839-1970

Clyde Porter, born in St. Louis, Missouri, and Mae Reed, from Des Moines, met as classmates at Iowa State College and married in 1910. Clyde, like his father, was an executive with Kansas City Power & Light and benefactor of the Kansas City Museum. Mae Reed Porter was an historian of the American West and an art collector. She purchased a collection of sketches and watercolors, 1837-1838, of Alfred Jacob Miller. Miller was born in Baltimore and studied in Paris and Rome. In 1837 he opened a studio in New Orleans, where he met Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish military officer and adventurer. Stewart engaged Miller to accompany him to a 1837 fur trade rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. On this expedition Miller produced many sketches which he later used as a basis of oil paintings. Miller was researched and popularized by Mae Reed Porter. The content of the art work were the trappers, traders, and personalities of the fur trade era in Montana and Wyoming. Mrs. Porter also gained recognition when she collaborated with Bernard DeVoto on "Across the Wide Missouri", winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1947. George Augustus Frederick Ruxton was another object of historical research for the Porters. Ruxton had written several books about his solitary wanderings in the far West in the mid-1800s. Filling in the gaps of Ruxton’s biography, the Porters produced "Ruxton of the Rockies" (1950) and an annotated version of Ruxton’s "Life in the Far West" (1950).