Frederick Schwatka

Frederick Schwatka (29 September 1849 – 2 November 1892) was a United States Army lieutenant [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A0CE2DD1F31E033A25757C0A9679D94639ED7CF "Lieutenant Schwatka's Death Accidental"] , "New York Times", 1892-11-04. (PDF). Retrieved on 2008-03-05] with degrees in medicine and law and a noted explorer of northern Canada.

Early life and career

Schwatka was born in Galena, Illinois to a Polish-American family whose ancestors spelled their name "Schwałka", as he once signed. [cite web
url = http://www.wspolnota-polska.org.pl/index.php?id=pwko05| publisher = Wspolnota-Polska.org | title = Polacy na Alasce | author = Marian Kałuski | date = | accessdate = ] When he was 10 his family moved to Salem, Oregon. Schwatka later worked in Oregon as a printer's apprentice and attended Willamette University. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1867 and graduated in 1871, serving as a second lieutenant in the Third Cavalry in the Dakota Territory. Studying law and medicine simultaneously, he was admitted to the Bar association of Nebraska in 1875 and received his medical degree from Bellevue Medical College in New York in the same year. [Schwatka (1965), p. 14]

earch for Franklin's expedition

In 1878–80, at the behest of the American Geographical Society he led an expedition to the Canadian Arctic to look for written records thought to have been left on or near King William Island by members of Franklin's lost expedition. Traveling to Hudson Bay on the schooner "Eothen", Schwatka's initial team included William Henry Gilder, his second in command; naturalist Heinrich Klutshak, Frank Melms, and Joe Eiberbing, an Inuit interpreter and guide who had assisted explorer Charles Francis Hall in his search for Franklin between 1860 and 1869. [Schwatka (1965), pp. 13–15]

The group, assisted by other Inuit, went north from Hudson Bay "with three sledges drawn by over forty dogs, relatively few provisions, but a large quantity of arms and ammunition." [Savours (1999), p. 301] They interviewed Inuit, visited known or likely sites of Franklin Expedition remains, and found a skeleton of one of the lost Franklin crewmen. Though the expedition failed to find the hoped-for papers, in a speech at a dinner given in Schwatka's honor by the American Geographical Society in 1880, he noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" [Schwatka (1965), pp.115–116] of eleven months and four days and convert|2709|mi|km|0 and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit. [Schwatka (1965), p. 116]

Later career and death

In 1883, he was sent to reconnoiter the Yukon River by the US Army. Going over the Chilkoot Pass, his party built rafts and floated down the Yukon River to its mouth in the Bering Sea, naming many geographic features along the way. At more than convert|1300|mi|km|0, it was the longest raft journey that had ever been made. [Sandler (2006), pp. 247–48] Schwatka's expedition alarmed the Canadian government, which sent an expedition under George Mercer Dawson to explore the Yukon in 1887. Beginning in 1896, Schwatka led two private expeditions to Alaska and three to northeastern Mexico and published descriptions of the social customs and the flora and fauna of these regions. [Sandler (2006), p. 248]

Schwatka’s book-length publications include "Along Alaska’s Great River" (1885) and "The Search for Franklin" (1882), republished in 1965 as "The Long Arctic Search". He died in Portland, Oregon at the age of 43 in 1892. The "New York Times" reported his death as the outcome of an accidental overdose of morphine but the "Coconino Sun" of Coconino county (Flagstaff), Arizona listed his death as a suicide by laudanum. [Ash, Susan L. (Pinky) Rogers, " [http://library.nau.edu/speccoll/indexes/Sun/subj92_framed.html The Coconino Sun, subject index, 1892] ", Northwestern Arizona University, about 1976, retrieved 1 September 2008] Schwatka was buried in Salem, Oregon. Schwatka Lake in Whitehorse, Yukon, is named after him.

References

Works cited

* Sandler, Martin (2006). "Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen's Ghost Ship". New York: Sterling Publishing Co. ISBN 978-1-4027-4085-5
* Savours, Ann (1999). "The Search for the North West Passage". New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312223722
* Schwatka, Frederick (1965). "The Long Arctic Search". Ed. Edouard A. Stackpole. New Bedford, Mass.: Reynolds-DeWalt

Further reading

Books

* Coleman, E.C. (2006). "The Royal Navy in Polar Exploration from Franklin to Scott". Tempus Publishing
* Schwatka, Frederick (1885). "Along Alaska's Great River". New York: Cassell & Company
* Schwatka, Frederick (1894). "A Summer in Alaska". St Louis, Missouri: J.W. Henry
* Schwatka, Frederick (1886). "Children of the Cold". New York: Cassell & Company
* Schwatka, Frederick (1893). "In the Land of Cave and Cliff Dwellers". New York: Cassell & Company
* Schwatka, Frederick (1885). "Nimrod in the North". New York: Cassell & Company

Articles

* Schwatka, Frederick. "Among the Apaches", "Century Magazine", Vol. XXXIV (May 1887)

External links

* [http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=6421 Biography at the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online"]