Born and educated in Cassel, where he first learned to paint from his father, he established a lifelong friendship with Charles Christian Nahl at school.

Unsuccessful as miners, Wenderoth and Nahl opened art studios, first in Sacramento and later in San Francisco, collaborating as painters, engravers and photographers.

After a trip to the South Seas and Australia, Wenderoth married and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the East Coast, where he established a photography studio.

[3] The sea-route to the west coast goldfields was considered far easier than the arduous 2,000-mile-long overland route, with its dangers of illness, thirst, and Indian attacks.

[4] Wenderoth and the Nahls left New York in March, traveled by ship to Havana, Cuba, then to Chagres, Panama.

[3] Most argonauts stayed in San Francisco to make plans, gather supplies, and recuperate from the long journey.

Wenderoth and Nahls, however, left the city the next day,[4] inland to the gold fields on the Yuba River in the Sierras.

Arriving in Rough and Ready, the two friends, with Nahl's half-brother Arthur, staked a claim[5] along the banks of Deer Creek.

[7] Considered a genre painting, it shows the miners in a high mountain canyon, using a sluice box to extract gold from the river bed.

Anthony Kirk, of the California Historical Society, writes that the painting is "powerful and authentic, wonderfully suggestive of the colossal labor necessary to wrest riches from the earth.

In 1853, Alonzo Delano commissioned illustrations for his Pen Knife Sketches from Wenderoth and Nahl, and a year later they were advertising as daguerreotypists.

Ivory types consist of placing a photograph and a painting "of the same subject over each other into a kind of sandwich that is then sealed together with beeswax.