Background
William Henry Gilder was born on August 16, 1838, in Philadelphia. He was a son of the Rev. William Henry Gilder and Jane (Nutt) Gilder, and a brother of Richard Watson and Jeannette Leonard Gilder.
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William Henry Gilder was born on August 16, 1838, in Philadelphia. He was a son of the Rev. William Henry Gilder and Jane (Nutt) Gilder, and a brother of Richard Watson and Jeannette Leonard Gilder.
Gilder's early life, uneventful, is obscure. On April 19, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted as a private in the 5th New York Infantry.
On November 15, 1862, he was transferred and became a second lieutenant in Company H, 40th New York Infantry; he was promoted to lieutenant in January and to captain and assistant adjutant-general in February following.
On May 29, 1863, he was again transferred, to Company D of the 40th Regiment. Wounded at Gettysburg and discharged, he re-enlisted on January 27, 1864, and the following October was wounded at Hatcher’s Run.
After the war, he went to Newark, New Jersey, and, although he had an aptitude for mathematics and was a skilled draftsman, he drifted into journalism.
In 1878, as a correspondent for the New York Herald, and second in command, he accompanied Lieut. Frederick Schwatka on an expedition to KingWilliam Land to discover the bodies or the records of the Sir John Franklin expedition. Schwatka and Gilder left New York June 19, 1878, and wintered with the natives near Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay.
A detailed search of the continental coast-line yielded nothing, but they determined to cross Simpson Strait to KingWilliam Land to continue the investigation. The party was absent from the original base of supplies almost a year and during this time traveled 3, 251 miles, the longest sledge journey then on record.
This expedition, while contributing nothing to geographic knowledge, was daring in its conception and remarkable in its execution. It established the loss of the Franklin party, gathered relics and remains, and recovered a few of the records of the last survivors.
Gilder’s articles in the Herald describing the investigation were collected and published in 1881 under the title of Schwatka’s Search.
In 1881, James Gordon Bennett organized an expedition to search for the Jeannette which, under G. W. De Long, had sailed in 1879 on a voyage of discovery through Bering Strait. Near Herald Island the Jeannette entered the ice pack from which it never escaped.
Cut off from the world it drifted with the pack for many months until it was crushed and destroyed in June 1881. In this same month the relief expedition, commanded by Lieut. Robert M. Berry, sailed from San Francisco on the Rodgers', Gilder accompanied it as correspondent for the Herald.
After a long cruise in the Arctic Ocean and an exploration of the islands of Herald and Wrangel, the Rodgers was itself destroyed by fire at St. Lawrence Bay in Eastern Siberia.
Berry ordered Gilder to proceed along the coast to Nizhni-Kolymsk and thence to Irkutsk to telegraph news of the loss of the Rodgers. At Nizhni- Kolymsk he learned of the destruction of the Jeannette and shortly afterward he met a courier carrying sealed reports of George W. Melville who had discovered the bodies of the De Long party and the records of the expedition.
Gilder’s enthusiasm was greater than his scruples: he broke open the sealed reports and forwarded the news to the Herald. After a hazardous journey across Siberia to Nizhni-Novgorod Gilder returned to America.
Ice Pack and Tundra (1883) is a collection of his articles, illustrated by many of his own drawings, describing this expedition. He later visited the island of Borneo for Bennett and represented the Herald in China when the French took Cochin.
Gilder returned to Newark as editor of the Sunday Standard when it was purchased by Thomas C. Barr. After its failure he went to Trenton and edited the Sunday Times for Barr. When this had failed he joined the staff of the New York Journal.
In the last years of his life, he devoted much of his time to magazine writing.
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