Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein (18 May 1824 – 18 February 1885) was a German-born military man, explorer, mapmaker, landscape artist and engraver.

[4] He would resign his commission in 1847 but briefly return to Germany in December 1848 to marry Irmgard von Kiesenwetter in Reichenbach, Oberlausitz, then Prussian Silesia, today Saxony.

[10] He cultivated the friendship of the pioneer botanist Dr. George Engelmann in St. Louis, and a correspondence in German survives in the archives of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

[11] 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.

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.

[13] 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.

[14] After the completion of the Beckwith expedition, Egloffstein moved to Washington, DC, where he helped edit volumes of the Pacific Railroad Reports.

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.

It was not until 2001 that an explanation for the discrepancies began to be developed: Jeremy Miller,[17] viewing Egloffstein's Black Cañon in a New York exhibition, recognized it not as a portion of the Grand Canyon, but as part of the Gunnison River in present-day Colorado.

[20] During the Civil War he produced a large map in his contoured style showing the Four Corners region for a report that was only published decades later.