Frederick Schwatka

Frederick Gustavus Schwatka was a United States Army lieutenant with degrees in medicine and law, and was a noted explorer of northern Canada and Alaska.

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. 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 1876, Lt. Schwatka led the initial cavalry charge at the Battle of Slim Buttes.

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. Schwatka was buried in Salem, Oregon.