After his appeals were exhausted, Cook went to Leavenworth
in 1925.  He
became the night warden of the prison hospital, invented
a dietary regimen to help recovering drug addicts, taught in the
literacy
program, lectured on his experiences in exploration, and became the
most
popular man in the prison. He also managed to rehabilitate
himself
somewhat with the public through the numerous high-minded articles he
published
in the prison’s paper, The New Era, which
he distributed at government
expense. In 1926, Roald Amundsen visited him at Leavenworth
as a token
of friendship from the Belgica days. When
Cook was paroled in March
1930, he was news again as a result.
His plans for a post-prison
career all fell through,
however. He could find no market for the writings that he had
produced
in prison, and the government forbade him from lecturing on his
experiences
there. He was reduced to helping out in his
friend’s ophthalmology
practice in Chicago, as his physician’s credentials were now
long out of
date and his own eyesight failing badly.
Cook spent most of the last
five years of his life
shuttling from Chicago to New York and New Jersey, where he stayed with
his daughters and sister. He died of complications of a
cerebral hemorrhage
in 1940, but not before reasserting his claim to have discovered the
North
Pole in several ways. He
is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo,
New York. |
