Frederick Schwatka
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Frederick Schwatka (29 September 1849 – 2 November 1892) was a US Army officer and an explorer of the Canadian North. He was born at Galena, Ill., and graduated at West Point in 1871. He served in the army until 1885, resigning as a lieutenant. During the years that he was in the army, he studied law and medicine. He was admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1875, and received his medical degree in New York in 1876.
In 1878-1880, at the behest of the American Geographical Society, he led an expedition to the Canadian Arctic to look for remains of the ill-fated Franklin expedition. His party covered 3,251 miles by sledge. William Henry Gilder acted as second in command.
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. Schwatka's expedition alarmed the Canadian government, who then sent an expedition under George Mercer Dawson in 1887.
He also later led two other expeditions to Alaska and to Mexico.
Schwatka Lake in Whitehorse, Yukon is named after him.
He wrote:
- Along Alaska's Great River (1885)
- Nimrod in the North (1885)
- Children of the Cold (1886)
[edit] References
- The Royal Navy in Polar Exploration from Franklin to Scott, E C Coleman 2006 (Tempus Publishing)
