George Engelmann in St. Louis, and a correspondence in German survives in the archives of the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1850 his cousin, the future novelist and naturalist Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein, visited him in St. Louis and was taught the skills of surveying by Egloffstein. Egloffstein was hired as a topographer for the last Western expedition of John Charles Frémont, 1853-54. He left the expedition in Parowan, Utah, after near starvation and exposure in the mountains and went to Great Salt Lake City with his friend and colleague, the Daguerreotypist Solomon Nunes Carvalho. In Great Salt Lake City he joined the survivors of the Gunnison–Beckwith Expedition under Lieutenant Edward G. Beckwith, producing maps and panoramas of Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and California, published in the Pacific Railroad Reports. After the completion of the Beckwith expedition, Egloffstein moved to Washington, DC, where he helped edit volumes of the Pacific Railroad Reports. He began experimenting with new ways to portray terrain by taking photographs of plaster models. Grand Canyon expedition In 1857-58 Egloffstein was one of two artists, along with Balduin Möllhausen, on the Joseph Christmas Ives expedition up the Colorado. The official report of the 1857-8 expedition to the Grand Canyon was titled "Report Upon the Colorado River of the West", published by Congress in 1861. Since by that time the US was deeply embroiled in a great civil war, the report received little attention. It was not until the 1880s, when public knowledge of the magnificent Grand Canyon had grown appreciably, that the report received greater recognition. It contained the first written descriptions of the Canyon's inner areas, as well as maps, panoramas, and illustrative plates by expedition artist Friedrich W. von Egloffstein. His maps are now regarded as among the finest produced in the nineteenth century, using a half-tone system of his own invention. Ives' report contains three engravings and three panoramic line drawings describing the "Big Caňon" of the Colorado. One particular stunning depiction was titled "Black Caňon" by Egloffstein himself, and has generally been understood to depict the section of the Colorado River where Hoover Dam now stands. These drawings have been criticized for over a hundred years by those who have subsequently visited the Canyon, since his depictions in no way resemble the actual terrain. Students of Egloffstein's work have been baffled by the apparent errors, since Egloffstein was superbly competent - the 1861 report also