From Hero to Humbug

This is the fourth in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.

The quintessential book of the Polar Controversy is My Attainment of the Pole, Dr. Cook’s narrative of his 1908-09 expedition, and his comments upon his controversy with Peary. It appeared in August 1911. It has already been treated to a detailed analysis elsewhere on this site (see under the “Artifacts” section), but deserves a few more comments here.

It went through three editions, the first published by Cook’s own Polar Publishing Co., the last two published by Mitchell Kennerley, amounting to more than 60,000 copies. Between the years 1912-1916, as Cook toured as a Lyceum and Chautauqua lecturer, he sold the book at cost at all his appearances and gave many other copies away for many years after that. The book won innumerable friends for Cook, who through its pages were convinced Cook had reached the Pole and had been cheated of his glory by a moneyed conspiracy.

Many who read the book felt as reviewers had in Germany when the book was issued there in translation as Meine Eroberung des Nordpols by Alfred Janssen in 1913:

“The book shows the clever researcher on the difficult way to the Pole and on his return over the limitless wastes of icy water with its inhuman difficulties. Everything is told in such a self-effacing and sympathetic way that we can rejoice in its simple heroism.”

“The contents of the book have held us chained from beginning to end. The descriptions are simple and modest and so natural. It can be no lie what this man lets us experience, and even if it is a lie, it has eared a place in every library.”

His readers also sensed what another reviewer, this time of Cook’s Hampton’s series, did when he praised Cook’s abilities as a descriptive writer, “This is vivid and real. It is not imaginative literature. It is obviously descriptive of actual and unusual experience. As such the record is worth preserving, irrespective of the writer’s reputation for veracity.”

That was because Cook’s experiences as an explorer were real. He had personally encountered all the “inhuman difficulties” the book describes, even if he fell more than 400 miles short of the North Pole on his attempt to reach it.

Another attractive feature of the book is its treatment of the Inuit, who Cook, unlike Peary, sincerely admired, and to whose skills in adapting to the polar environment he gave full credit for his “success.”  This homage is memorialized in the book’s dedication, “To the Pathfinders . . .”, and by the original edition’s cover, which despite its singular title, shows his own profile between those of the two Inuit who accompanied him, Ahwelah and Etukishuk.

Unlike Peary’s book, which makes no reference at all to the Polar Controversy, Cook’s has a significant amount to say in rebuttal to points raised against his claim to have beaten Peary to the pole by nearly a year. It also contains many arguments intended to show that his claim was defeated by manipulations of the press and bribes orchestrated by an “Arctic Trust” of Peary’s rich and influential backers, and to cast doubt on their and Peary’s characters.

The one question still left unanswered at the time the analysis referred to above was written, was just how much of My Attainment Cook wrote himself and how much of it was ghosted by T. Everett Harré.

When I did my annotated transcription of the diary Cook kept on his polar attempt (The Lost Polar Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook, available on Amazon or eBay) that question was definitively answered. A very large part of the book’s narrative content appears in that notebook, written in the underground igloo in which he spent the winter of 1908-09 with his two Inuit companions. In fact, a surprising amount of the book appears in practically unaltered form there.

Therefore, his description of Harré’s original contributions as limited to “handling of certain purely adventure matter,” appears accurate, and Harré’s statement that he acted simply in the ordinary role of editor of Cook’s already written narrative also seems accurate. So, unlike Peary’s The North Pole, Cook’s book was not ghosted from interviews, but was closely based on an already existing manuscript written by Cook himself.

Unlike Peary’s book, which was translated into at least a half-dozen languages, Cook’s was only translated into German. This was because, he, although born in America, was a pure German by birth, and his story raised a certain amount of national pride that one of German blood had been the one to discover the North Pole, and therefore it found a sympathetic ear within his ancestral homeland.

In addition to the full translation, in 1928 an abridged version under the title Zum Mittelpunkt der Arktis. Reiseberichte ohne die Pol-Kontroverse. (To the Center of the Arctic. The travelogues without reference to the polar controversy), edited by Erwin Volckmann, was issued by Westermann, Verlag. As indicated by the subtitle, the abridgment removed all references to Cook’s dispute with Peary, but retained the core narrative of his expedition.

This is the third in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.

Peary always had a strict rule that no expedition member could write anything about his experiences until one year after his own official narrative had appeared. He apparently made an exception for George Borup. The North Pole was issued in September 1910, and Borup’s book was released in March 1911. Perhaps this was due to both being issued by the same publisher, Frederick A. Stokes, who may have seen advantages in “striking while the iron is hot” with Borup’s book before interest in the “discovery of the North Pole” faded. Or Peary may have felt that the character of Borup’s book would not be seen as a rival to his own.

Borup was a recent graduate of Yale (1907), and his book is a reflection of that and being the youngest “assistant” Peary took with him in 1908. It is shot through with humorous asides, Hully Gees, Holy Smokes, Gee-Whizes and other college slang. However, it also has many interesting insights into Inuit culture and the individual personalities of the various Inuit that Peary and Cook lived and worked with, that Peary’s book almost totally lacked. Although some of these vignettes are the subject for Borup’s humorous asides, they also show a respect for Inuit resourcefulness and character, which give the book some lasting value. For instance, he described their habit of swapping wives: “The habit of changing wives does not break up the love of man and wife, which is sorter like German separable verbs.”

A page from Borup’s book. “Florodora” was a popular musical whose most memorable feature was a song and dance number performed by six gorgeous girls.

Looking beyond the hagiographic treatment of Peary it contains, the book’s content relevant to the Polar Controversy is still of subtle, if slight interest to connoisseurs of the subject. Borup was the third of Peary’s assistants to turn back on the polar journey, so he personally experienced many of the hard experiences needed to attempt to reach the North Pole, and although he mentions experiences of others who went farther, he gives no account at all of Peary’s experiences once the two had parted. These descriptions of Borup’s and others’ experiences on the polar journey, however, only add to the doubts expressed by Lewin that Peary’s own account of what he accomplished after leaving behind his last literate witness is doubtful in the extreme, it being so at odds with those recorded by Borup and others.

Borup describes the horrendous ice conditions encountered, and the backbreaking labor necessary to make forward progress.  He also describes the drift of the ice, first west, then east, that made the outward trail hard to follow, and which was often completely lost, and remarks on the considerable open water encountered, which held his party up repeatedly.  Because of these conditions, he estimates that it took three extra miles of travel to make ten miles progress north in a straight line.  He repeatedly reports the sledges going to pieces, at one point smashing eight of them to gain 60 miles, the constant troubles had with the dogs, and the Inuit’s great fear of the sea ice and their malingering and reluctance to go forward to face its obstacles.

After his return to land, while on a trip to Cape Morris Jesup to take tidal measurements, he and Donald MacMillan received via Inuit messenger, a letter from Peary dated April 28, 1909, stating “Arrived on board yesterday. Northern Journey entirely satisfactory.” Their ecstatic reaction recorded by Borup shows that they immediately took this to mean Peary had reached the Pole, even though the long letter, which he reproduces in full, made no specific mention of doing so, or any reference whatever to his “satisfactory” experiences otherwise.

Borup’s book also contains a brief account of Borup’s version of what Dr. Cook’s two Inuit companions said about their experiences with him on his 1908 polar attempt, intended to cast doubt that he ever traveled more than two days northward before turning back (see the post on this blog for January 27, 2023). He also discusses what he considers further evidence of Cook’s failure to get far toward the Pole in the form of a description of Cook’s one surviving sledge, which he says could not possibly have made the full journey to the North Pole and back due to its relatively intact condition, albeit it had been cut down to half of its original size. In so doing, he actually reveals the shortcomings of Peary’s “clipper-built” sledges, made perfectly plain in his account of his portion of the journey (which Peary put great emphasis on as one of the major reasons he was able to reach the Pole by exceeding the performance of any other explorer’s attempt) by describing how they started to come apart quickly and regularly once the journey over the polar ice began.

Although there is little in Borup’s book that would directly cast doubt on Peary’s claim other than his descriptions of traveling conditions, which raise doubt on Peary’s ability to travel as fast as he said he did, correspondence in Peary’s papers shows that he had his lawyer, Charles Nichols, carefully go over Borup’s manuscript to make sure it would not add anything to the numerous questions being expressed in the press in reaction to conflicts and contradictions between Peary’s serialized narrative, as it had appeared in Hampton’s Magazine, and The North Pole.

By the breezy narrative contained in A Tenderfoot with Peary, Borup became the darling of the expedition. He was given a job at the American Museum of Natural History, became the protege of Edmund Otis Hovey, the Museum’s geological curator and editor of its journal, Natural History. Hovey favored him over MacMillan, to lead an expedition partially sponsored by the Museum to visit and map Crocker Land, which Peary claimed to have discovered at a distance while standing on the heights of Axel Heiberg Island in 1906. Borup was even in the process of courting Peary’s teenage daughter in 1912 when he drowned in a boating accident on Long Island Sound, postponing the start of the Crocker Land Expedition until 1913.

Borup’s book also exists in a “souvenir edition” prepared by Stokes for the 11th annual dinner of the American Bookseller’s Association held at the hotel Astor on May 11, 1911.

This is the second in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.

It took less than a year before the first book appeared doubting Peary’s claim with the questioning title, Did Peary Reach the Pole? It was published in England by W. Henry Lewin, who styled himself merely as “An Englishman in the Street,” but who was something of a professional skeptic on a number of topics in all of his privately published later writings.

Using Peary’s own narrative in The North Pole, and comparing it with those published by other explorers on similar journeys, particularly Nansen’s Farthest North, Lewin was the first to identify the major questionable features of Peary’s claim:

• The implausible enormous distances Peary said he covered during the last three “marches” toward the Pole after leaving Bob Bartlett.

• The incredible difference between the time he took to return to his ship from the Pole and the time it took Bartlett to do the same thing. Although Bartlett had a 266 mile head start on him, Peary would have beaten him back had he not paused to rest upon reaching land again.

• The impossible difference in Peary’s daily speeds when compared to other explorers’ on their attempts to reach the Pole via dog sledge.

• Peary’s lack of observations adequate to keep the straight line course to the Pole he claimed, especially the absence of any observations for longitude at any point along the journey, or any for compass correction.

• Peary’s claim that despite the record of all other polar journeys, including his own previous attempts, that there was no lateral movement of the ice for large portions of his entire journey.

• Peary’s failure to account for the added distance needed to cover detours to avoid leads and hummocks, which when added to the distance actually traveled, even by Lewin’s very modest estimates, made Peary’s timetable even more improbable.

Nevertheless, although Lewin’s answer to the title of his book was a resounding “NO,” he declined to say that Peary’s polar claim was a fraud because Peary was a “man physically and mentally of a high type.”

“No such charge as attempting to bluff mankind can possibly be made against a man of Commander Peary’s type. The original high intellectual calibre of the man, added to the greatness of a record developed and enlarged by twenty-five years’ experience in the Polar solitudes must be proof-positive against any such possibility. . . .No man who has been brought face to face in the soul’s communion with Nature in its wildest form over such a period, could be knowingly guilty of such an atrocity.”

Instead he attributed Peary’s failure to inadequate observations and the difficulties involved in determining positions with a sextant when the sun was at so low an elevation as Peary encountered in early April 1909.

In any case, in his introduction he stated that his motivation in writing the book was not to disparage Peary, but to suggest that the monumental doubts his narrative raised also raised the possibility that an English expedition could still capture the Pole for the British Empire’s own glory. At its conclusion, He excused the award of a special gold medal to Peary by the Royal Geographical Society as possibly due to “certain diplomatic considerations,” rather than the strength of his “proofs.” Whether Lewin was aware at the time he was writing that the inscription on the medal said that it was being awarded for “Arctic Explorations 1886-1909” rather than for discovering the North Pole, is not known.

Whether or not he actually felt Peary was guiltless in 1911, twenty-five years later Lewin would write another book on the same subject, and in the interim had found cause to eat every word of this earlier evaluation of Peary’s character.

This is the first in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published. The first is Peary’s personal narrative of his alleged “discovery of the North Pole,” a claim now almost entirely discounted as a fraud.

The book Peary published should have been the prime document stating his case and resolving all questions surrounding his claims, yet, The North Pole has been instead the primary document used to argue against his alleged discovery. How could it be that the book that claims to be the record of Peary’s ultimate success in the goal of a lifetime has come to be the sourcebook of those who brand it a fraud? Beyond the real questionable aspects of Peary’s claimed feat, the answer lies in the strange history of this book, which indicates that Peary had relatively little to do with the finished narrative that appears on its pages. In fact, Peary actually “wrote” none of it.

The book is largely derived from the series of articles that appeared in the pages of Hampton’s Magazine in 1910 as “Peary’s Own Story,” whose actual author was the poet, Elsa Barker. Barker was not the first choice to write Peary’s narrative, however. The man chosen to do the job of ghostwriting the articles was originally Harris Merton Lyon. His trial article was rejected, however, because after talking to Peary he could not fathom why anyone would want to reach the North Pole and it showed in the copy he provided Hampton’s. As a result, Ben Hampton, the magazine’s publisher, called in Barker, who had shown her enthusiasm for the story and who had written a preliminary article introducing the series to the magazine’s readers.

Barker left a detailed account of how she assembled material needed for the series, which has already been reproduced in this blog in the post dated May 25, 2025. Because it was assembled from interviews with not only Peary himself, but also with several of his associates, including Captain Robert E. Bartlett, and from many details plagiarized from the voluminous diary kept by the expedition’s physician, John W. Goodsell, and even from certain passages that had previously appeared in Peary’s 1907 book, Nearest the Pole, it necessarily lacked the singular perspective it would have had had Peary written it himself from his own point of view. Barker’s procedure produced a narrative that was sometimes contradictory even as to material facts. These flaws and the doubtful aspects of Peary’s speed after leaving behind his last navigation-trained witness, as well as discrepancies with accounts subsequently published by Matt Henson and other members of his expedition, were later exploited by those seeking to show the narrative of events his book contained to be unreliable. Despite her urgent requests, Peary seemed reluctant even when asked by Barker to provide specific material that she needed to fill out crucial parts of Peary’s narrative, especially in regard to the days he allegedly spent at the North Pole.

Even though inconsistencies were pointed out in the press as the Hampton’s series progressed, and many who read them found the narrative they contained unconvincing as “proof” of Peary’s discovery, most of these were not resolved in Peary’s subsequent book published by Frederick A. Stokes. The man chosen to ghostwrite the book version was a former reporter for the New York Sun named A.E. Thomas. Thomas was even more frustrated in his dealings with Peary over the material he sought, and so was forced to rely heavily on the content of the Hampton’s articles Barker had written. Thomas’s later claim that he wrote 80% of the book can be easily discounted because at least that much is drawn materially from Barker’s articles, most of it taken from them verbatim. Thomas, too, like Barker, was forced to rely on interviews with Bartlett, Goodsell and Donald MacMillan because Peary was away on a tour of Europe at the time, and when he returned seemed more interested in trying to get a bill through Congress that would retire him as a rear admiral than in providing copy. Thomas later excused himself for the result, saying that because Peary was “a damned dull human being,” incapable of providing exciting material, The North Pole was “a damned dull book.”

When published in September 1910, the book received largely good reviews, but Peary had antagonized so many by his boorish behavior during the late dispute with Dr. Frederick A. Cook, that it sold slowly and was not, in the end, a financial success. His German publisher was so dissatisfied with his sales that he brought suit against Peary to recover his purchase price for the rights, saying it didn’t sell because there was nothing in the book that could prove Peary actually reached the North Pole.

The book was reprinted once in 1910, but never again by Stokes. The book is rather common, but its plain dust jacket is very scarce.

Stokes also brought out a limited, signed edition of 500 copies, partially leather bound, dubbed the “Thomas H. Hubbard Edition,” after the President of the Peary Arctic Club.

There were two editions in England as well, the ordinary edition, which could be had in a slipcase, and another limited edition of 500 put out in white vellum binding, both showing a facsimile of the gold medal presented Peary by the Royal Geographical Society in 1910. The limited edition was signed not only by Peary but by Robert Bartlett as well, who, as a Newfoundlander, was a British subject.

The book was translated in to several languages, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Flemish, and Czech among them.

For a more detailed account of how the book was written, see the new introduction to the Cooper Square Press facsimile edition, 2001.

After his conviction for using the US Mails to defraud in 1923, Dr. Cook spent 16 months in the Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth, TX pending his appeal. There he came in contact with John Western, an Australian who was being confined there by immigration authorities until he could be deported. It so happened that Western was an expert in fancy needlework, and Cook asked him to teach him how to do embroidery.

When his ex-wife visited him, as she did almost daily, Cook asked for her to bring him multi-colored thread. Cook turned out many pieces of embroidery during his confinement to pass the time, mostly tablecloths and table runners. And he continued his embroidery work after he arrived at Leavenworth penitentiary to start serving his 14-year sentence.

A few of his works of embroidery were among objects donated by his granddaughter’s will to the Sullivan County Historical Society in Hurleyville, NY., which maintains a room devoted to Dr. Cook. They can be seen in the following snapshots:

Cook signed his pieces with a small “FAC” monogram, seen here at the bottom of the central panel.

Generally, Cook did not accept visitors while in prison, but on January 20, 1926, he made an exception when Roald Amundsen, who was on a fundraising trip for his coming attempt to fly across the entire polar basin in a dirigible, stopped off to see him. Amundsen had known Cook from when they were both members of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897-1899, when Amundsen had been Second Mate and Cook the expedition’s surgeon. As a result of those common experiences, Amundsen felt he owed his life to Cook and felt a moral obligation to visit him while in the Midwest.

After their 45 minute reunion, Amundsen was quoted as saying, “I have read Dr. Cook’s story and I have read Peary’s. In Peary’s story I have not found anything of consequence not covered already by Dr. Cook.” This was widely interpreted as his saying Peary had no more proof that he reached the North Pole than Cook did. As a result, Amundsen was roundly blasted in the press, his lecture before the National Geographic Society was canceled, and he prepared to return to Europe.

When he reached New York before his departure, he found a small package addressed to him in his hotel room. When he opened it and saw its contents, his voice broke with emotion as he held up a beautifully embroidered linen table runner 15 inches wide and four feet long. “Well, and whom do you think this if from?” He asked the reporter who had accompanied him there. “The man I once thought was going go discover both the North and South Pole. Now, poor fellow, he is in Leavenworth Prison. And he did every stitch of it with his own hands. It is pathetic. Yes, it is from Dr. Cook, I am more touched by this gift than by almost anything that has happened to me in a long time.”

Today, Dr. Cook’s table runner is on display in Amundsen’s house, Uranienborg, in Oppegård, Norway. If you go to the virtual tour on its website, it is item #3 in the 3-D model of the Blue Room. You can see it at this web address: https://amundsen.mia.no/en/rooms/blue-room/

The snapshots are courtesy of Carol Smith. These items are currently not on display.

Frederick Albert Cook was born on this day 160 years ago in the hamlet of Hortonville in Sullivan County, NY.  

“History will give Dr. Cook a place–this may be high, it may be low, but a place is assured”

– from the unpublished memoirs of Frederick A. Cook

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

Frederick A. Stokes

Peary’s book about his 1909 expedition, The North Pole, was published in September 1910. Near the end of the month, its publisher, Frederick A. Stokes, received a night letter from Peary at Eagle Island, his summer home in Casco Bay. Peary was furious.

On the big colored map produced by the J.H. Matthews Co. of Buffalo, NY, which was tipped into the back of each book, in the otherwise blank section of the Arctic Ocean, right above Peary’s 1906 discovery, “Crocker Land,” appeared “Bradley Land,” the new land Dr. Frederick A. Cook said he had sighted on his own journey to the North Pole in 1908.  

Stokes was appalled at this situation, and wrote to Peary as soon as he had taken steps to correct it. Here is his letter, here published in full for the first time.  

Due to Stokes efforts, copies of The North Pole with the original map showing “Bradley Land” are very scarce, comparatively, to those showing the erasure.

However, the same map appeared in the 1910 edition of Adolphus W. Greely’s book, Handbook of Polar Discoveries, published by Little, Brown in Boston. What’s more, that version of the map not only showed “Bradley Land,” but included among the routes taken by various polar explorers, that claimed to have been taken by Cook to the North Pole.

Peary despised Greely, and came to believe he was supplying anti-Peary material to Congress to provoke an investigation of Peary’s own claim to have reached the pole. The publication of this map surely did nothing to discourage that belief.

The Stokes letter is among the Peary papers in Record Group XP, at NARA II.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

On January 28, 1915, Lillian Kiel gave testimony before the Education Committee of the House of Representatives relevant to the controversy between Cook and Peary over which, if either, explorer reached the North Pole. She had been a stenographer for Hampton’s Magazine in 1910 and had taken dictation from Elsa Barker, who was ghosting Peary’s series for the magazine entitled “Peary’s Own Story of the Discovery of the North Pole.”

Elsa Barker

Barker was enamored of Peary’s quest for the North Pole and had written the poem “The Frozen Grail.”

Later in her career she was became interested in Spiritualism and wrote three books in which she claimed to be the autodictat of a dead judge in California.

Subsequent to Peary’s series, the magazine published in 1911 a series by Peary’s rival for polar attainment, entitled “Dr. Cook’s Own Story.” Kiel testified how the editorial staff of the magazine had cut through Cook’s galley proofs and inserted statements in his finished articles implying that he was not sure he had reached the Pole in April 1908, which the magazine emblazoned on its cover as “Dr. Cook’s Confession.”

Furthermore, she testified that Peary had no story of his own to tell: “[Peary] did not write his own story. . . . Mr. Peary had no story, he had no data, he had nothing to present to Hampton’s Magazine. . . . Mr. Peary merely answered questions. From those notes Mrs. Elsa Barker made up the story.”

This testimony appeared as part of the transcript of that hearing in the Appendix to the Congressional Record dated March 4, 1915, as “The Attack on Dr. Frederick A. Cook.”

In 1936, Elsa Barker wrote up her recollections of her dealings with Peary in relation to his series in Hampton’s. Here it is published for the first time:

Barker describes choosing Kiel to take her dictation because of her “quiet personality” and “her accuracy.” She may have not realized that Kiel avoided speaking because of severe speech impediment caused by a cleft pallet. Kiel went on to later elaborate on her testimony before Congress in a long unpublished article titled “The Faked ‘Confession’; or How a Magazine Made History,” written in 1916. In it she confirms Baker’s estimate of her by accurately quoting from several letters dictated to Peary by Barker now in NARA II.

Barker’s statement can be found in Record Group XP at NARA II, College Park, MD.

Kiel’s long article is now in the Frederick Cook Papers at the Library of Congress.

On September 4, 1909 Dr. Cook landed in Copenhagen to the adulation of the masses assembled along the shore of the Danish capital’s harbor to greet the explorer as he disembarked from the Hans Egede.

He was swept in a mad crush to the Meteorological Department building, where he gave a little speech from the balcony before being hustled out the back door to a waiting carriage and taken to the Hotel Phoenix. The weather-beaten explorer was then put into the hands of Copenhagen’s finest barbers and tailors. A dentist was called in, several chipped teeth were attended to, and when the time came to accompany the American Minister to Denmark to the legation, Cook reappeared, perfectly groomed and faultlessly attired.

In the afternoon, he was presented by Minister Egan to King Frederick at Bernstoff Castle in an audience that lasted an hour. In the evening he spent an hour answering questions, many of them hostile, from reporters from all over the world who had come to Copenhagen when it was learned that it was there that he would first touch European soil.

The next day he visited the Royal photographer to have his portrait made,

and in the evening Cook was the guest of honor at the royal palace, Charlottenlund, where the entire royal family, down to the smallest child, was present. At dinner the doctor sat at the right hand of the king—an honor no one could remember ever having been given to a private individual. After dinner, which was a quiet affair, the three princesses, Ingeborg, Thyra, and Dagmar, and all the children gathered around Dr. Cook to hear a recounting of his adventures. He took delight in telling the youngest children about the polar bears and other animals of the Far North, answering their every eager question.

As a parting gift and souvenir of his visit, King Frederick presented him with two ceramics from the royal porcelain factory, Royal Copenhagen. One was a huge vase in the shape of two polar bears, the other a large figurine of a musk oxen.

Here is a photo of Dr. Cook in which can be seen the vase in the background.

These items are not unique, but were taken from the stock of Royal Copenhagen, their style numbers being #530 for the musk ox figurine, and #1831 for the polar bear vase.

The actual ones given by the king to Cook still survive, however. The vase is now in the possession of the family of the late Bette Hutchinson, Cook’s step-granddaughter.

The musk ox is in the possession of the Sullivan County Historical Society in Hurleyville, NY, which maintains a room devoted to Dr. Cook.

It was given by the will of Dr. Cook’s granddaughter, Janet Vetter. It is not on display at this time.

The photo of the Dr. Cook’s polar bear vase is courtesy of the late Bette Hutchinson; the photo of the musk ox is courtesy of Carol Smith.

Cook started out in the petroleum industry in Wyoming in 1917, but quickly moved on to Texas with news of the fabulous oil strikes there in 1918. He established his first petroleum company that year as The Texas Eagle Oil Co. The company was capitalized at $300,000 in February 1919. It issued 10,000 public shares of stock at $10 a share. That was small money for such an enterprise, so to raise more, in August, a subsidiary company, the Texas Eagle Producing and Refining Co. was created with additional stock amounting to $2.5 million.

Letters soliciting investors were soon sent out:

A third company, The Texas Eagle Oil and Refining Co., was formed from the assets of the first two in February 1920 and incorporated under the liberal laws of Delaware as a Trust Estate. The company was capitalized at $5 million and issued at least two varieties of stock certificates. The first bore a small eagle vignette to the left. Each of the certificates is hand-signed as “F. A. Cook,”  President.

The second variety has a larger eagle vignette at the top center. These are also hand-signed by Cook.

But that company failed, going into receivership, and out of existence on December 5, 1921. But Cook wasn’t finished with oil yet. The next year he organized the Petroleum Producers Association. It issued “Receipt Certificates” for the PPA shares it exchanged for the shares of stock of numerous bankrupt oil companies sent in by their shareholders along with one dollar for each PPA share. These were issued in nearly unlimited quantities as it “merged” 313 defunct oil companies, capitalizing them at $380 million.

PPA shares come in only one variety. The basic certificate with the “Lone Star” vignette at the center, was used by many of the numerous oil companies formed in Texas during the 1920s oil boom there, and is not unique to PPA’s. These certificates do not bear Cook’s signature, but only the hand stamped signature of F. P. Smith, PPA’s Secretary.

Cooks aggressive promotions of this company resulted in his arrest in April 1923, and his subsequent show trial. Overwhelming evidence convinced the jury that PPA’s “mergers” plan was an elaborate ponzi scheme, which, as a result, found him guilty on 12 counts of using the U.S. mails to defraud, and Cook was sentenced to 14 years, nine months in Leavenworth Penitentiary and given a fine of $12,000.

These colorful stock certificates serve as souvenirs of Dr. Cook’s disastrous dip into the Texas Oil Boom.