About this Book

Little is known about the fifth and last western expedition of the celebrated explorer John Charles Frémont. The great effort to survey a transcontinental railway route across the 38th parallel ended short of success in the snows of Utah in 1854 but involved a meticulous photographic documentation -- in daguerreotypes -- of the route from the Mississippi westward. It was believed that a central railroad across the country would favour abolitionists in the great debate then raging in the country over slavery. Solomon Nunes Carvalho was hired by Frémont to photograph the expedition -- the first time a western expeditionary survey had been systematically documented in photographs. Tragically, the daguerreotypes were destroyed by fire, and Frémont's fifth expedition was lost to history. Author and daguerreotypist Robert Shlaer remarkably has reconstructed the expedition in 120 original daguerreotypes. Using Frémont's maps, expedition documents, and Carvalho's diary accounts, Shlaer recreates the lost expedition across America's most breathtaking landscape using photography's first and most venerable method of daguerreotypye.