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47 IV Views of Mount Shasta To California with Beckwith, 1854 It is not necessary to describe the beauty, extent, and grandeur of the scenes which, from these positions, in the pure atmosphere of this portion of our country, greeted him, frequently embracing an area equal to that of some of our Atlantic States . . . —E. G. Beckwith, Pacific Railroad Reports, quarto edition, vol. 2. The War Department had decided from the outset that Gunnison ’s expedition would not continue west of the Great Basin on the thirty-eighth parallel north so dear to Benton and Frémont . Instead, it was to move north to Great Salt Lake City and establish connections with earlier paths along the emigrant trail from the Platte River. Surveyors held that half of the route from the Missouri River to Fort Bridger via South Pass was already generally known from the earlier expeditions of Frémont or Howard Stansbury.1 With the tentative arrival of spring, Beckwith ’s continuation of the Gunnison expedition moved out of Great Salt Lake City in April to search the eastern approaches to the region for the Pacific Railroad survey before returning to the city in early May. From the outset, the leadership style of Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith meant that Egloffstein’s role differed profoundly from that in Frémont’s expedition. Whereas Frémont isolated himself in his“lodge”and concentrated crucial procedures in his own hands in a passive-aggressive fashion, Beckwith delegated authority and openly trusted competent people to act on their own. Egloffstein was recognized as one of the most capable members of his entourage, and he was chosen time and again for special tasks such as scouting ahead of the column.2 Beckwith trusted Egloffstein to designate the precise route of the proposed railroad as the expedition advanced and then simply received the detailed report. It appears that Egloffstein replaced the geologist Jacob Schiel as Beckwith’s confidant. Schiel remained with the main 48 The Baron in the Grand Canyon party from that point on, while Beckwith and Egloffstein went on ahead.3 Beckwith held that a route he had already roughed out after the massacre from Sevier Lake to the Great Salt Lake was sufficient to link the two reports. He had described this right of way at the end of the Gunnison report. The continuation of his route would now be along forty-one and forty-two degrees north, and his column set out from the city on April 4 to establish an approach to the Great Salt Lake from the east. Passing up the east side of the lake, the expedition entered the Weber River Canyon at the foot of the Wasatch. The only known complete ink sketch by Egloffstein, Lower Weber Cañon—North of Great Salt Lake City, ink wash on paper , is preserved at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (illustration 14).4 This was the model for Egloffstein’s first plate, “Weber Lower Cañon / April 5th at 2 p.m. from an island in Weber River, Valley of Great Salt Lake,” engraved by C. Schumann and printed at Selmar Siebert’s Engraving and Printing Establishment in Washington (illustration 15). Comparison of the painting and the published lithograph shows that the image changed little in the transition, save for the more precise line required by the different media. Even the incidental human/ animal figures (“staffage”) included to give scale to the image of nature, were faithfully rendered. The only noticeable difference is the lack of one area of shadowing in the painting’s illustration of the snow-topped mountains overshadowing the valley. The following day he sketched the “Second or Sheeprock Ca- ñon of the Weber River / April 6,2 pm,” engraved by Schumann andprintedbyR.Hinshelwood(illustration16).Thenhesketched the expedition at rest at “Porcupine Terraces / Uintah Mountains in the Distance / Camp April 16th to 17th” engraved by Schumann and printed by Siebert (illustration 17), showing an encampment under a crescent moon. Within ten days they were back in snow, so that the men—and Beckwith’s bulldog, Rink—began suffering severely from glare and resulting snow blindness. They had reached the area of Fort Bridger, which Beckwith visualized as the jumping-off point to the route already traced by Captain Stansbury in 1850, passing to the well-traveled valley of the Platte.5 This route would parallel the established emigration trail across present-day Wyoming and through the South Pass promoted by Frémont in the...

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