"He represented Friends of the Indians, a Quaker organization that was concerned with the humanitarian treatment of the native inhabitants in government custody.

"[4] Colyer advocated the establishment of reservations for the Apache, Yavapai, and neighboring tribes in New Mexico and Arizona to improve their living conditions.

[5] "His 1869 report is important because of its thoroughness, its presumptions, and, most particularly, its influence for more than a decade on officials concerned with the government's response to Alaska natives.

Both petitions were signed by only a small fraction of the colony's population, and British Columbia was ultimately admitted as a Canadian province in 1871.

When Colyer returned east and established his studio in Connecticut, he produced a small number of oil paintings of Western scenes in 1872-1875.

[3] In the 1860s, Colyer took a yachting trip up the Connecticut shore as far as New Haven, looking for a good spot to relocate his home and studio.

He moved to Darien, Connecticut in the early 1870s and set up a studio named after his close friend John Kensett.

[10] The Douglas Frazer Art gallery offers this assessment: "Vincent Colyer is an acknowledged master of American topographical watercolors.

... His small, painterly watercolor sketches of western forts, early settlements and Indian villages, from New Mexico to Alaska, are an important artistic and visual record.

More than two hundred of those sketches, mostly accomplished in the field between 1868 and 1872 while working as a Special Indian Commissioner, are found in major institutional collections.

"[2] Referring to works by both Colyer and another artist, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma noted, "What these images might lack in aesthetic merit is made up for in charm and expressiveness as quick impressions of the West.