Abstract
The German topographer Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein (1824–1885) migrated in 1849 to the United States where he accompanied three exploration expeditions into the American West: With John C. Frémont (1853/1854) on a winter crossing of the Rocky Mountains from St. Louis to the Great Basin, Edward G. Beckwith (1854) on a railroad reconnaissance from Salt Lake City to California, and Joseph C. Ives (1857/1858) on the Colorado River and across its Southern Plateau. For the last expedition, he developed relief shaded maps of the Grand Canyon, the first such maps of a portion of the United States. After serving in Civil War, he developed an early photomechanical printing method.
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- 1.
A striking aspect of the reconnaissance expeditions and transcontinental railroad surveys of the 1840s and 1850s was their cosmopolitan flair with sizeable numbers of Europeans, with the rank and file as well as among the scientific specialists, included in almost each of the field parties. Arguably the largest foreign nationality involved were Germans, with the most notable topographers and map makers being Georg Karl Preuß, known in the United States as George Charles Preuss, who in the 1840s had accompanied Frémont on some of his expeditions to California, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein, who also started out with Frémont, and later joined and was responsible for the cartography of the (Gunnison-)Beckwith-Expedition (1853–)1854 and the Ives-Expedition 1857–1858. Among the other specialists of German origin lending their expertise to these U.S. expeditions, the most colorful character undoubtedly was the Prussian Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen (1825–1905). He came to America in 1849, first gaining frontier experience in 1851 while accompanying Duke Paul of Württemberg’s expedition into the Rocky Mountains. This exposure to the rugged wilderness of the West and his art talent made him a valuable member of both the Whipple-Expedition 1853 and the Ives-Expedition 1854, as he made numerous sketches of the topography and drew many illustrations for their final reports. Still in 1854 he returned to Prussia, married the rumored illegitimate daughter of Alexander von Humboldt, and published two accounts of his wanderings, which rank among the best travel books on the West in the 1850s, before embarking on a writing career with about 50 novels on American sujets earning him the nickname of “the German Fenimore Cooper” (Goetzmann 1959: 309–310).
- 2.
Egloffstein’s unbridled enthusiasm repeatedly got the topographer into trouble. One day, as Möllhausen noted in his diary, Egloffstein set out to view the canyon accompanied only by a soldier and an Indian. He selected a difficult route to get on top of one of the bluffs to follow the course of the river farther so that he could make corrections to his draft map. The little party was still out when the sun set and the expedition leader began to worry about the fate of the detachment. Fortunately, the men returned to camp late that night – suffering from thirst, hunger, sore feet – and the loss of “Grizzly”, the expedition’s beloved pet dog (Huseman 1995: 48).
- 3.
According to a printed von Egloffstein family history, after the leg injury he returned to active service and participated in the besieging of Petersburg-Richmond in Virginia in 1864–1865 (Egloffstein 1894: 285). As a curiosity, it might be added that the von Egloffsteins obviously had no equestrian luck, since his grandfather Carl Ludwig (1745–1773), a Prussian captain and chamberlain, died from falling off a horse. Similarly, his father, while being captain of a Bavarian cavalry regiment during the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, fell so badly from a horse that he became invalid and had to quit active service (Egloffstein 1894: 278, 347).
- 4.
See F.W. von Egloffstein, F.K.J. von Gerolt, and C. de Berghes. 1864. Contribution to the Geology, and Physical Geography of Mexico, including a Geological and Topographical Map, with Profiles, of Some of the Principle Mining Districts. New York: D. Appleton.
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Demhardt, I.J. (2012). “An approximation to a bird’s eye view, and is intelligible to every eye […]”. Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein, the Exploration of the American West, and Its First Relief Shaded Maps. In: Liebenberg, E., Demhardt, I. (eds) History of Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19088-9_4
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