The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 100, July 1996 - April, 1997 Page: 110

110 Southwestern Historical Quarterly July
restrained and objective as Seele's entries are revealing and intimate. What re-
sults grows on the reader as a combination on one hand of history and scholar-
ship and, on the other, of the complex psychology of stress, depression, and
motivation on the frontier. Nothing like this has yet come to light from nine-
teenth-century Texas. That these almost too honest entries were written by a
man not without literary skill and perspective makes the text a most unusual arti-
fact in its own right and a valuable key to the literature of Romanticism.
That the young Seele could be tedious as well as dull proves by the end of this
book to be of little import. Gish is correct when he claims (p. xxiv) that the work
is significant as a historical, personal, public, and literary document. I would
add, having spent the better part of the past two years living off-the-grid and re-
thinking such narratives of frontier life, that this work also warrants medical and
psychological study if one wants to comprehend an immigration where numbing
losses and stupendous labors were the stuff of daily life.
Hill Country Institute GLEN E. LICH
Wild River, Timeless Canyons: Balduin M6llhausen's Watercolors of the Colorado. By
Ben W. Huseman. (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum; Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1995. Pp. 227. Index, figures, catalog illustrations, pho-
tographs, color plates. ISBN 0-88360-084-6. $70.00.)
The art historian Barbara Novak has written: "In Europe the tour de force
generally received its scale from the artist's ambition, set resplendently within a
major tradition. In America, it consisted in simply 'getting there.' The artist be-
came the hero of his own journey." As Ben W. Huseman's masterful study of the
Prussian artist Heinrich Balduin M6llhausen demonstrates, "getting there" could
happen to a European too-even a German romantic protege of the great
Alexander von Humboldt.
Huseman's book focuses on Mllhausen's epic trip up the Colorado River of
the West and his exploration of the Grand Canyon country with Lt. Joseph
Christmas Ives's expedition in 1857-1858. On this monumental journey, M611-
hausen and another German artist, F. W. von Egloffstein, painted and sketched
the first views of the Grand Canyon. Long lost, M1llhausen's watercolor and
gauche paintings of the canyon country and the Indians, so vividly displayed as
lithograph plates and woodcuts in Ives's Report, recently surfaced in dramatic
fashion. A contractor tearing down a house in New York in the mid-1970os
found an album of forty-six of M611hausen's Grand Canyon watercolors. This al-
bum was purchased by the Amon Carter Museum, and Huseman, together with
David Miller, set out on a research odyssey that took them all over Germany as
well as the dramatic depths of the Grand Canyon. Indeed, the thorough, meticu-
lous research, including on-site travels, is one of the strengths of this beautitul
book that also serves as a catalogue raisonn6 of M6llhausen's work in America.
M6llhausen was not just a casual traveler. He explored and painted the Ameri-
can West on three notable occasions: in 1851 with Duke Paul of Wfirttemberg
on a journey to Fort Laramie and back in which the duke left him out on the