Henry Raup Wagner
Henry Raup Wagner (September 27, 1862 – March 27, 1957) was an American book collector, bibliographer, cartographer, historian, and business executive.
He was the author of over 170 publications, including books and scholarly essays, mainly about the histories of the American frontier and the Spanish exploration and colonization of Mexico.
In 1903, he became the manager of their London office where he collected many more books on different subjects, including South American history and economics.
From 1906 to 1915, he managed the Guggenheims' affairs in Mexico, and was then transferred to Chile where he studied in writer José Toribio Medina's residence.
Wagner helped revive the California Historical Society in 1922 and sold his last major book collection that year to the Huntington Library.
His first major stop was Kansas City, Missouri, where he became interested in the ore mining business and the history of the American frontier.
During his stays in Durango and Zacatecas, Mexico, Wagner became interested in the history of the earlier forms of precious metal ore extraction in New Spain and began collecting books on the subject.
Among Wagner's stops on the west coast during his Mexican assignment were Seattle, at the beginning of the Klondike Gold Rush, and British Columbia.
ASARCO transferred him to Mexico and ran the company's affairs in that country from its regional office El Paso, Texas.
[7] In 1915, Wagner moved to the Chilean capital, Santiago, as part of a two-year contract with the Guggenheims to run their affairs there.
[8] According to Charles Lewis Camp, in 1922 Wagner played an important role in the revival of the California Historical Society, which had been defunct since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Wagner then went on to complete The Spanish Southwest, 1542–1794, an Annotated Bibliography, inspired by his studies and findings in Medina's residence in Chile, which was published in 1924.
He also finished working on Sir Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World, Its Aims and Achievements, a book published in 1926 which he referred to as his "first love", according to Thomas W.
From 1927 onward, he wrote a series of seven essays for the Quarterly that consist mainly of translations of Spanish exploration logs about the western coasts of North America.
His studies on that topic eventually culminated with The Cartography of the Northwest Coast of America to the Year 1800 published by the University of California Press in 1937.
[15] That year he also printed the Spanish edition of his 1935 English language supplement to Joaquín García Icazbalceta's 1886 book, Bibliografia Mexicana del Siglo XIV.
[16] Peter Pond, Yankee Fur Trader and Explorer, published in 1955, was one of Wagner's last books printed before his death.
[18] According to his associate Ruth Frey Axe, he thought highly of, and worked "unceasingly for twenty years" on The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas.
[19] Upon returning from Chile, Wagner married Blanche Henriette Collet, a French painter, at a ceremony in Oakland on July 17, 1917, after which they settled in a house they had purchased in Berkeley, California.
Wagner gradually lost his eyesight during his final years but continued his research nonetheless with the assistance of Axe.
In addition to those published pieces, many unpublished bibliographical and cartographic documents went to the Yale University Library over a fifty-year period.
[24] In 1971, Archibald Hanna Jr., curator of the "Western Americana" section at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale, wrote the following about Wagner's book collecting: "If Bancroft was in a sense the grandfather of western Americana collecting, the father was undoubtedly Henry Raup Wagner.
Its first recipient was Carl Irving Wheat, and then over the years to individuals like Dale Morgan in 1961, and George R. Stewart (tied) in 1972, among others.
