The forty-two drawings are arranged according to their five general subjects: California Native Americans (7), California landscapes (24), Mexico (4), Central America (6), and Other (1). Although the exact Indian tribes in Brown's drawings are not known, it is believed that they are the Maidu, Nomlaki, Patwin, Wintun, and/or the Shasta Indians because those tribes lived in the areas in California where Brown was traveling. These drawings include portraits of Indians and scenes of daily life in Indian villages. Five of these drawings have been published in Drawn from Life: California Indians in Pen and Brush by Theodora Kroeber, Albert B. Elsasser, and Robert F. Heizer, andPersonal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua by John Russell Bartlett. The twenty-four drawings of California landscapes include views of mining camps, a quartz mill, San Francisco, Marysville, Mount Shasta, Grass Valley, the Sacramento River, and Nevada City. The ten drawings of Mexico and Central America include views of Acapulco, the Gulf of California, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Also included in the collection is an undated drawing of the Susquehanna river in Port Deposit, Maryland, and a blank sheet of paper that was probably used as a mount for one of the drawings. The titles used are the titles supplied by the artist. Several of the drawings have sketches or inscriptions on the verso.

Henry B. Brown was probably born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 1816. In the 1840s, he worked as a portrait artist and engraver, and in 1851 he traveled to San Francisco with his friend Jacob Bailey Moore. Brown worked for Moore for the next several months, gathering specimens and making drawings in the California countryside. In March of 1852, he was commissioned by John Russell Bartlett, head of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission and a friend of Moore, to draw views of landscapes and Indians in Northern California, assist with collecting Indian vocabularies, and make maps of the area, with a view towards contributing to Bartlett's book "Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua" (1854). Brown traveled to New York in the late summer of 1852, and presumably drew his coastal scenes of Mexico and Central America during the trip. From 1856 to 1859, he served as US Consul for Bermuda. Little is known of his life after that date; his health was poor at the time of his resignation in 1859, and he may have died in late 1860 or soon after. He should not be confused with the Maine artist Harrison Bird Brown (1831-1915) or with the escaped slave Henry "Box" Brown (b. 1816).

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