William Adolf Baillie Grohman

William Adolph Baillie Grohman (1851–1921) was an Anglo-Austrian author of works on the Tyrol and the history of hunting, a big game sportsman, and a Kootenay pioneer.

Grohmann was born in 1851 in Gmunden, the son of Adolf Rheinhold Grohmann (1822–1877) and Francis Margaret 'Fanny' Reade (1831–1908). He spent much of his youth in Tyrol in Austria, and could speak Tyrolese dialect like a native. His early years were spent at the Schloss von St. Wolfgang which had a famous garden. His father was a manic depressive and in 1861 Fanny had him committed to an asylum, 1873 Fanny bought the semi-derelict Schloss Matzen in the Tyrol, near the branch of the Zillertal and the Inn Valley. As a young man Grohmann roamed out from the family castle to hunt chamois and deer in the surrounding high alps, wandering for days through the still-remote Tyrolese mountain villages. His two earliest books, Tyrol & the Tyrolese (1876) and Gaddings with a Primitive People (1878), provide a rare first-hand insight into Tyrolese folk customs and the austere, isolated existence of pre-industrial Alpine village communities.

He was an expert mountaineer and made the first winter ascent of the Großglockner, the highest mountain in Austria (3798m), on 2 January 1875, and was a member of the Alpine Club. He is credited as being one of the first to introduce skis to the Tyrol, having previously encountered their use at his father in law's hunting lodge in Norway.

A crack shot and a passionate big-game hunter, he travelled out to the American West many times the 1870s and 1880s to shoot big game when the Rockies and mountain states were opening up to sportsmen. His book Camps in the Rockies (1882) gives an account of his travels though Wyoming and Idaho, both as a "topshelfer" (a rich comfort-laden sportsman) and later on – more to his boyhood taste of stalking with Tyrolean mountain huntsmen – roughing it with trappers and Native Americans. Although written in a style of detached amusement to titillate armchair Victorian readers, this work, like his earlier books about the Tyrolese, has careful and sympathetic passages on American Indian and local customs, and gives a valuable first-hand account of the American and Canadian West just before and after the arrival of the railway. He ranged widely over the Pacific Slope and the Central Rockies and explored new ranges in the Selkirks.

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