Schwatka was born in Galena, Illinois, the son of Frederick Gustavus Sr. and Amelia (Hukill) Schwatka. His father Frederick G. Sr. (1810-1888) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of August and Catherine (Geissendorfer) Schwatke (the original German spelling with the same pronunciation), German Lutheran immigrants from East Prussia (now eastern Poland) and Bavaria, respectively. His mother Amelia Hukill (1812-1885) was born near Bethany, Brooke County, in present-day West Virginia and was of English and Scots descent. When he was 10 his family moved to Salem, Oregon. Schwatka later worked in Oregon as a printer's apprentice and attended Willamette University.[2] 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.[3] In 1876, Lt. Schwatka led the initial cavalry charge at the Battle of Slim Buttes.
Search 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 Klutschak, Frank Melms, and Joe Ebierbing, an Inuit interpreter and guide who had assisted explorer Charles Francis Hall in his search for Franklin between 1860 and 1869.[4]
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."[5] They interviewed Inuit, visited known or likely sites of Franklin Expedition remains, and found a skeleton of one of the lost Franklin crewmen, identified as Lieutenant John Irving of HMS Terror. 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"[6] of eleven months and four days and 2,709 miles (4,360 km) and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the Caucasians relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit.[7]
Later career
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 1,300 miles (2,092 km), it was the longest raft journey that had ever been made.[8] Schwatka's expedition alarmed the Canadian government, which sent an expedition under George Mercer Dawson to explore the Yukon in 1887. After his resignation from the army in 1885, Schwatka led two private expeditions to Alaska financed by William D. Boyce[9] and three to northeastern Mexico and published descriptions of the social customs and the flora and fauna of these regions.[10]
Schwatka received the Roquette Arctic Medal from the Geographical Society of Paris, and a medal from the Imperial Geographical Society of Russia. He was an honorary member of the Geographical Societies of Bremen, Geneva, and Rome.[11]
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