Charles Joseph La Trobe

Charles La Trobe was born in London, the son of Christian Ignatius Latrobe, a leader of the Moravian Church, from a family of French Huguenot descent, whose mother was a member of the Moravian Church born in the United States. He was educated in England and later spent time in Switzerland and was active in mountaineering; he made a number of ascents in the Alps 1824–26. La Trobe wrote several travel books describing his experiences: The Alpenstock: Or Sketches of Swiss Scenery and Manners (1829) and The Pedestrian: A Summer's Ramble in the Tyrol (1832). Charles's uncle (Christian's brother) was the British-American "father of American architecture" Benjamin Henry Latrobe who designed the White House porticos.

In 1832, La Trobe visited the United States, chaperoning Count Albert Pourtales on a Grand Tour. The two met Washington Irving on their ship to America,with whom they would travel for six months. The three visited New England, the White Mountains, and Niagara Falls. Soon after, they met Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who brought them to Missouri, Arkansas Territory, and what is now Oklahoma to see lands claimed by the U.S. for the relocation of displaced Native nations. Using the La Trobe home in Baltimore as a base, Charles and Pourtales visited every U.S. state except Alabama. They saw Native effigy mounds, the imprisoned Sauk leader Black Hawk twice, and attended the powwows and treaty negotiations of the Powatomi in Chicago. Pourtales engaged in sex tourism on the trip, often engaging in Indigenous practices in order to gain sexual favors. In 1833, La Trobe visited Fort Snelling in Dakota territory with Pourtales, as some of the earliest white tourists to the area. While camping at Bad Axe River, they witnessed the meteor shower of the Leonids.

In 1834, travelled from New Orleans to Mexico with Washington Irving. He then wrote the epistolary travel account The Rambler in North America, 1832–1835 (1835) and The Rambler in Mexico (1836). Author Edgar Allen Poe called The Rambler in North America "the best book in America yet published", and John Stuart Mill said that the work contained "some of the most attractive descriptions we ever read". The London Quarterly Review called it "the book of the season as far as America is concerned".

On 16 September 1835, he married Sophie de Montmollin (1809–1854) in Berne, Switzerland. Their first child, Agnes Louisa de La Trobe, was born in Switzerland on 2 April 1837.