Everything about Frederick Schwatka totally explained
Frederick Schwatka (
29 September 1849 –
2 November 1892) was a United States Army officer and an explorer of northern Canada. He was born in
Galena, Illinois, in a Polish-American family whose ancestors spelled the name Schwałka, as he once signed. When he was 10, his family moved to
Salem, Oregon, and 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.
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.
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." 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" of eleven months and four days and and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit.
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, it was the longest raft journey that had ever been made. 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.
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, in 1892 of an accidental overdose of
morphine and was buried in Salem, Oregon.
Schwatka Lake in
Whitehorse, Yukon, is named after him.
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