Of the thousands of stamps churned out by the US Postal Service over the past 160-plus years, a top contender for the nation’s most beautiful piece of postage is the 1898 $1 issue titled Western Cattle in Storm.
The stamp was part of the Trans-Mississippi Issue, a set of nine commemorative postage stamps issued by the US to mark the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition held in Omaha, Neb.
While all nine stamps in the set are noted for their beauty, Western Cattle in Storm stands out. The breed of cattle that were meant to represent the ruggedness of the American West and that inspired the original painting actually derive from the West Highlands of Scotland.
That’s because the vision for the design was sparked by a James McWhirter painting depicting cattle in a winter storm in the West Highlands of Scotland. This painting was copied, without the permission of the owner, Lord Blythswood, by an American cattle company as a trademark of sorts, according to the website The Swedish Tiger.
“McWhirter, however, was a Scot, and his painting, entitled ‘The Vanguard,’ was soon discovered to have been a depiction of Scottish cattle in a storm in Scotland,” according to a company called Chicago Stamps. “It was actually painted in a small farmhouse near the Scottish highland town of Calendar. The scene did not depict an event west of the Mississippi, but it might have been, and few really cared about this detail, for cattle were an important part of the western US economy.”
This image caught the attention of the Post Office Department and Raymond Ostrander Smith, the staff designer of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at the time, and it was adopted for the $1 design. Little did the designer know that the scene depicted was in Scotland, not the Western US, as was supposed. A full apology was later issued to the owner of the painting.
Prior to the issuance of the $1 Western Cattle in Storm, only two other $1 US stamps had ever been printed and released to the public: the $1 Columbia stamp issued in 1893 and titled Isabella Pledging Her Jewels; and the $1 Oliver Hazard Perry issued in 1895.
The nine stamps of the Trans-Mississippi series were originally to be bi-colored, but the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, its resources overtaxed by the needs of the Spanish-American War, simplified the printing process, issuing the stamps in single colors.
In all, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced 56,900 copies of Western Cattle in Storm.
Curiously, not everyone liked Western Cattle in Storm initially. John Luff, one of the most influential philatelic writers of his day, apparently did not think much of the stamp or others in the series, according to Chicago Stamps. “The stamps are poorly conceived and executed, overloaded with ornaments, heavy in color and blurred in printing,” he wrote in 1902.
Today, pristine copies of Western Cattle in Storm can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
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