Samuel Wilkeson Jr.

While serving as the New York Times' Washington correspondent and reporting on the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, he found his own son, Lt. Bayard Wilkeson, dead on the battlefield.

I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven.

He amputated his own leg with a penknife,[6] but later died in a makeshift field hospital that was abandoned by the time his father and uncle found his body on July 3.

Samuel Wilkeson filed a story that appeared on page one of the New York Times on the 87th anniversary of American Independence Day; his lede and his mournful conclusion centered on his own son's death but the greater part of the multi-column, multi-page dispatch was a comprehensive and widely admired account of the third and final day of the decisive and brutal battle.

[2] Beginning in 1868 he went along as a "historian" on the extension of the Northern Pacific route, eventually publishing a pamphlet entitled Wilkeson's Notes on Puget Sound, and then was an executive with the railroad 1870 until his death.