In "The Baron in the Grand Canyon," Steven Rowan presents the
first comprehensive look at the life of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von
Egloffstein, mapmaker, artist, explorer, and inventor. Utilizing
new German and American sources, Rowan clarifies many mysteries
about the life of this major artist and cartographer of the
American West.
This revealing account concentrates on Egloffstein's activity in
the American mountain West from 1853 to 1858. The early chapters
cover his roots as a member of an imperial baronial family in
Franconia, his service in the Prussian army, his arrival in the
United States in 1846, and his links to his scandalous
gothic-novelist cousin, Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein.
Egloffstein's work as a cartographer in St. Louis in the 1840s
led to his participation in John C. Fremont's final expedition to
the West in 1853 and 1854. He left Fremont for Salt Lake City where
he joined the Gunnison Expedition under the leadership of Edward
Beckwith. During this time, Egloffstein produced his most
outstanding panoramas and views of the expedition, which were
published in "Pacific Railroad Reports."
Egloffstein also served along with Heinrich Balduin Mollhusen as
one of the artists and as the chief cartographer of Joseph
Christmas Ives's expedition up the Colorado River. The two large
maps produced by Egloffstein for the expedition report are regarded
as classics of American art and cartography in the nineteenth
century.
While with the Ives expedition, Egloffstein performed his
revolutionary experiments in printing photographic images. He
developed a procedure for working from photographs of plaster
models of terrain, and that led him to invent "heliography," a
method of creating printing plates directly from photographs. He
later went on to launch a company to exploit his photographic
printing process, which closed after only a few years of
operation.
Among the many images in this engaging narrative are photographs
of the Egloffstein castle and of Egloffstein in 1865 and in his
later years. Also include are illustrations that were published in
the "PRR," such as "View Showing the Formation of the Canon of
Grand River today called the Gunnison River] / near the Mouth of
Lake Fork with Indications of the Formidable Side Canons" and
Beckwith Map 1: "From the Valley of Green River to the Great Salt
Lake."
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