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NEW EDITIONS OF VOLUMES 1, 2, AND 3 OF "THE GRAND CANON" ARE NOW AVAILABLE: OPEN "THE GRAND CANON" TAB ON THIS WEBSITE
MANY NEW OFFERINGS UNDER THE "SPECIALIZED BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND HISTORICAL VOLUMES" TAB ARE ALSO NOW AVAILABLE
April 2025
♦ A Big Misunderstanding: F. W. von Egloffstein's 1858 Map of the Grand Canyon and Its Influence. (by Earle E. Spamer)
♦ Introducing the Grand Canyon: Introductions to Grand Canyon's History from Raven's Perch Media (by Earle E. Spamer)
January 2025
♦ Mapping Grand Canyon: A Chronological Cartobibliography and Chorographical Study. Second Edition. (by Earle E. Spamer)
December 2024
♦ Naming the Grand Canyon : with an Appendix, Grand Canyon Echoes (by Earle E. Spamer) (Who named the Grand Canyon?)
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April 2025
A Big Misunderstanding: F. W. von Egloffstein's 1858 Map of the Grand Canyon and Its Influence
In early January 1858, at Fort Yuma, California, Prussian baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein joined an exploring expedition under the command of Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives. Their objective was to map the Colorado River and locate its head of navigation, thence explore overland across the northern tier of New Mexico Territory. The mission covertly scouted Mormon advances into the region and sought means by which to gain access to interior locations closer to Utah by way of the river. During the land expedition they hoped to locate the confluence of the Little Colorado River with the main Colorado; in the process they went into the Grand Canyon twice. A veteran of other expeditions in the West, Egloffstein created for Ives’ 1861 final report many scenic illustrations and two shaded relief maps. “Map No. 2” depicts—for the first time—a visual concept of the physiography of the Grand Canyon (“Big Cañon” as it was known then). The technical means that he was still in the process of inventing to make these relief maps has been praised. It was a proprietary and still not wholly understood process of heliography, by which a sculpted plaster model was photographically processed as an engraving in steel. But the topographer has been unfairly criticized for geographical oddities on his map, and the present study aims to remove much of that disapproval. The map displays the results of field-based surveys and adds borrowed and hypothetical topographies. As this study demonstrates, the baron’s survey work was reasonably accurate, and his interpretive work is explicable though he may have been affected by the geographic notions of available maps. Later, cartographers who depended on his map to help produce newer maps of the greater Southwest and North America redrew landscapes in and around the Grand Canyon that were less faithful to ground truth and were not corrected for years. These cartographical trajectories of “Map No. 2” have not been explored before. A Big Misunderstanding is a graphic study of the whole and details of the Grand Canyon map with comparisons to modern and period maps of the region. It rationalizes the limits of visual observation that Egloffstein faced during the land expedition and speculates on what motivated him to fill in the areas that he did not survey. Examples of apparent earlier influences on Egloffstein’s cartographic presentation are illustrated, along with specimens of later maps that distorted his geographies.
This highly graphic publication is best viewed in book format as opposing pages. It is not recommended for black-and-white printing.
Available in three formats: 1 ) Large PDF file, 2 ) smaller PDF file (with images in slightly lower resolution), and 3 ) a PDF designed for sequential single-page viewing that turns pages with vertically turned illustrations (that take advantage of long-margin page length) to horizontal orientation.
Flip Book is Available: https://online.fliphtml5.com/ryvqb/aelp/
April 2025
Introducing the Grand Canyon: Introductions to Grand Canyon's History from Raven's Perch Media
When Raven’s Perch Media began to produce historically focused publications, some were strictly narratives; others were built around bibliographies about their subjects. Extended informational introductions were added to offer something more interesting to read than a blur of citations—in other words, to give readers something to read. Viewpoints and observations were incorporated that never had been noticed in the published literature, ocassionally spun with a bit of humor. Eye-catching illustrations were inserted, too. These, then, are meant to engage readers, even in those works that were built around a bibliography! But scattered as they are, they fail to impart the idea that Grand Canyon has many particular stories.
One may correctly argue that there are suitable introductions to Grand Canyon’s history already in print. They are admirable, focusing on the canyon’s rich past, highlighting prominent events and people. Yet they necessarily condense some stories, omit others—and retell for the umpteenth time the same old stories that must be given space in every canyon history book no matter its angle. Now Raven’s Perch Media relieves the reader with specific historical aspects that are undetected in the regular histories or may have been bypassed as being beyond the editorial guardrails of structured narratives. It is the prefaces and introductions that hopefully stand out and stand alone.
While these preliminaries can vie for attention, the reader of one book might be unaware of the others, which locate little-occupied vantage points. Thus the purpose of Introducing the Grand Canyon is to assemble these preludes into an anthology. Here, readers can be let into fascinating special aspects that may differ from the regular attentions of Grand Canyon’s history. It is a sampler, of course, but a means by which the Canyon—and the people who were there—can be seen in new light or, for some of them, sighted for the first time.
Flip Book is Available: https://online.fliphtml5.com/ryvqb/qpjt/
January 2025
Mapping Grand Canyon: A Chronological Cartobibliography and Chorographical Study. Second Edition.
Mapping Grand Canyon focuses on maps on which the Grand Canyon is labeled by one of its four Western-derived names during the past two and a half centuries, though without particular formality or consistency. The four principal sections are Puerto de Bucareli (1777–1884), Big Canyon (1853–1910), Great Canyon (1853–1879), and Grand Canyon (1868–present). (For a general introduction to the evolution of these names, see Naming the Grand Canyon (Raven's Perch Media, 2024).
Flip Book is Available: https://online.fliphtml5.com/ryvqb/oepn/
December 2024
Naming the Grand Canyon : with an Appendix, Grand Canyon Echoes
The origin of the name “Grand Canyon” is unknown. It was not the neological invention of John Wesley Powell in 1869, as is often retold. Earlier in the 19th century it was known as “Big Canyon” and “Great Canyon,” perhaps the translation of the term by which French-speaking mountain men may have described it—un grand cañon. Both appellations inattentively survived the coming of “Grand Canyon,” but only for a couple of decades. The earliest known non-Indigenous term, Puerto de Bucareli, was conferred in the diary of the Franciscan friar Francisco Garcés when he visited the Havasupai people in 1776, the first non-Native person known to have reached the Grand Canyon since a party of Spanish conquistadores arrived on the rim 236 years earlier, in 1540 (who are not recorded as having given it a name). Ingenious misspellings of the puerto appeared on manuscript and printed maps in the 18th and 19th centuries but its association as Garcés’s mountain pass for the Colorado River was never remembered, nor did it label an entire canyon. The origins for each “Canyon” name, though, remain mysteries, including the first known appearance of “Grand Canyon” in 1857 that disappointingly lacked an admission of neologism or credit to another source. This has not dissuaded travelers and writers from exploiting the name for other landscapes around the world or from exercising it in a superfluity of analogies and metaphors. In the end, an answer to the question, “Who named the Grand Canyon?” may be unessential, given that Native peoples have had words from time immemorial that affirm long spiritual and cultural associations with the canyon.
Flip Book is Available: https://online.fliphtml5.com/ryvqb/zcfa/
IN PREPARATION
Unscheduled (2026)
THE GREAT DIVIDE. Stalking the Lower Colorado River, 1842-2025: a year-by-year bibliographical witness to the division and depletion of the American Nile. [dates subject to change]
