From Hero to Humbug

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

This is how I portrayed Dr. Cook’s stop at Lerwick in the Shetland Islands to announce his claim to have attained the North Pole on September 1, 1909 in my book, Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved.

But it took a couple of days for rumors to spread through Lerwick about Cook’s claims. Here’s how the local papers in the Shetland Islands reported Cook’s visit; first the Shetland News for September 4, 1909: 

Cook sent his cables  from the second floor of the Post Office on Commerce Street (photo by author)

Here’s the story from the Shetland Times for the same day, which was far more creative in its accounts of Cook’s journey:

Finally, here is a letter that appeared on September 11 in that same newspaper, foreshadowing the great controversy to come:

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

Peary had given his longtime expedition member, Matthew A. Henson, the cold shoulder ever since their “arrival” at what Peary claimed was the North Pole. Henson reported Peary practically said nothing to him on the return journey and kept his distance once back aboard the Roosevelt. The silence continued upon the expedition’s return to the US in September 1909.

Once back in New York, Henson had an offer for a series of lectures from the well-known promoter William A. Brady. Brady had previously tried to land the lecture rights from Dr. Cook and then Peary without success. As a result of Brady’s offer, Henson wrote to Peary asking his permission to accept, and also for copies of some of Peary’s photographs and a lantern slide map of the Arctic to be shown at his appearances. Peary turned him down flat. This prompted Henson to tell Peary why he had decided to accept Brady’s offer anyway, saying, “I have been with you a good many years on these trips and have never derived any material benefits. I am not getting any younger, and it has come to an issue where I have to look out for myself.”

Brady broke Matt in with a lecture at Middletown, Connecticut. It was an awkward performance. Henson had a prepared text, but because he was functionally illiterate*, his hesitations in attempting to read it had to be constantly prompted from the wings. Finally, he just abandoned his script and simply talked about his 70 stereooptican slides as they were flashed on the screen, including one he claimed to be “the only photograph of the pole in existence,” after which he answered questions from the sparse audience. The receipts in Middletown amounted to less than $37 for two performances. But the appearance still made news.

There were rumors that Henson had challenged Dr. Cook to a public debate. Peary wanted this to be avoided at all costs and seemed to fear what Henson might inadvertently say. He wrote to Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club:

(”I have not happened to come across the so called Henson challenge to Cook, though I note references to it in the papers

“While I can only infer from these references what the challenge really is, it strikes me that anything of the kind would be unwise for three reasons. It is likely to make a fool of Henson by giving him pronounce megalomania; it will put him in a position to be tangled up and made to say anything by emissaries of the [New York] Herald [which was backing Cook’s claim], and it will introduce into this matter the race issue.

“All this, it seems to me, without the least possible chance of there being any possible gain to balance.”)

Peary also strenuously objected to Henson showing photographs made on the journey to the North Pole, claiming that Henson by contract was bound to turn over all of the photographs he had taken to him. He was so concerned about the picture of the Pole itself, that he wired, “If Henson, as newspapers say, has picture of NP, or the sledge journey he has lied to me, and these pictures must on no account be shown by him I doubt the papers.” The dispute with Peary was just the publicity Brady dreamed of, and he was now so sure that Henson’s lecture tour would be a success that he booked him at the Hippodrome for the evening of October 17.

The Hippodrome was billed as the largest theater in the world; certainly it was the largest in the United States. Occupying an entire block on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, it was host to full-fledged three-ring circuses and other monster extravaganzas.

Henson must have been awed to step onto the stage of this cavernous house, which sat up to 5,300. But the paying audience amounted to only about 500 scattered among a vast sea of empty seats.

One of them was occupied by Herbert L. Bridgman, who Peary had dispatched to get a look at Henson’s photographs and generally do damage control if necessary. Bridgman didn’t seem too concerned by Henson’s performance, though he did say some unsettling things, including that Cook’s Eskimos, when they had first come aboard at Etah, had said that Cook had told them they had arrived at the North Pole [see the series “The ‘Eskimo Testimony’” below.]   After this fiasco Brady immediately canceled the two nights he had booked at Carnegie Hall, the turnout at the Hippodrome not justifying any hope for recovering the high overhead of that booking. Instead, he took Henson to Pittsburgh. But there and the farther west Henson went, the receipts continued to dwindle until Brady had to compromise his contract and pay him off.

Matt Henson ready for the stage: Henson’s publicity photograph by White Studio, theatrical photographers

Nevertheless, Henson’s appearances had led to a number of revealing statements that became fodder in the ongoing Polar Controversy, and the building case against Peary actually having attained the North Pole, himself. Henson related that on the trip to the North Pole, Peary, because of his crippled feet, had been little more than baggage on the sledges, and that because Peary rode most of the way, Henson was in the lead when they arrived at the North Pole, technically making him the first man to have reached that fabled spot.

Peary was outraged, and assured General Thomas Hubbard, President of the Peary Arctic Club, that these and other reported statements were “all lies.” He complained to Benjamin Hampton, owner of Hampton’s Magazine, who paid Peary a record per-word fee for the magazine rights to his narrative, that “Henson, after my looking after him for years, after giving him a position in the advance party with me on all of my expeditions, and after permitting him to go with me to the pole this time, has now for the sake of few dollars deliberately and intentionally broken faith with me.” And to Herbert Bridgman Peary was unequivocal about what such “disloyalty” meant: “He has deliberately and premeditatedly deceived me and broken his explicit and thoroughly understood word and promise to me and I am done with him absolutely.”

*For those interested in the documentary evidence of this statement, see the Introduction to the Cooper Square Press edition of Henson’s book, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, published in 2001.

All of the quoted correspondence, including the one published here for the first time, can be found among the Peary Family Collection, 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.

In the latest book on the Polar Controversy, author Darrell Hartman focuses on the Press’ role in making the 1909 dispute between Cook and Peary a national obsession. He agrees with me that the resultant recognition of Robert E. Peary as the true discoverer of the North Pole, and the demise of Frederick Cook’s prior claim, was a watershed event in the history of New York newspaper publishing. Peary was backed by the New York Times, Cook by the then much more influential New York Herald. As I put it in my book, “the downfall of Dr. Cook marked the beginning of the rise of the Times to the powerful institution it was to become, and the decline of the once preeminent Herald into oblivion.”

Among the questions I was not able to answer in my book, Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, was whether or not Dunkle and Loose acted on their own, or were someone’s paid agents, hired to place the doctor in a compromising position (see my post for May 21, 2022 below). I was able to speculate from the evidence I saw, however, that if they were someone’s agents, as I wrote in my book, “The principal suspect would have to be William C. Reick,” an editor at the New York Times, the paper in which appeared their extensive affidavits about how they concocted fake observations at Cook’s request to serve as proof of his polar attainment. The affidavits were spread over nearly three full pages—by far the largest amount of space given a single story on a single day during all of 1909.

To many who read the Dunkle and Loose affidavits, the whole idea that Cook would enter so casually into so dangerous and risky an arrangement with total strangers seemed preposterous, the alternative monstrous and the conclusion obvious. As one newspaper editorialized; “Dr. Cook is either the greatest and at the same time the stupidest charlatan who ever attempted to impose upon a skeptical world, or he is the victim of the most malignant and devilishly ingenious persecution that hatred and envy could devise.”

Reick had a motive: he wanted to get even with James Gordon Bennett, the flamboyant owner of the Herald, where Reick had once been the powerful City Editor. But Bennett, ever wary of competitors for his absolute power over the Herald, kicked him upstairs by making him President of the New York Herald Company. Reick eventually quit and joined the Times. Among the many resources Hartman consulted for his book, were those in the New York Public Library, among them the papers of Adolph S. Ochs, long time owner of the Times. There he may have found at least a partial answer to whether Dunkle and Loose acted alone, or they were part of a larger plot.

General Thomas H. Hubbard (via a brevet commission from the Civil War), was the owner of the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, as well as the president of Western Union and a powerful corporate lawyer. He was also an alumnus of Bowdoin College in Maine, Robert E. Peary’s alma mater, and had been since 1908 president of the Peary Arctic Club, a group of millionaires formed in 1898 to bankroll Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole. When the dispute between Peary and Cook over priority at the Pole broke out, Hubbard quickly grasped that Peary was not capable of managing the situation and became Peary’s official spokesman. He also financed a massive anti-Cook campaign, paying for such things as the Barrrill Affidavit, the Parker-Browne expedition to Mt. McKinley (see my post for July 17, 2017 below), and later, an extensive mail campaign to discredit Cook’s attempts to rehabilitate his claim to have reached the North Pole a year ahead of Peary. It now develops that he apparently also paid for the Dunkle and Loose Affidavits as well, though it does not seem to have initiated the scheme that led up to them.

That Cook had dealings with Dunkle and Loose there can be no question. Several close associates, including his private secretary, Walter Lonsdale, attested to that as a fact, but considered Cook’s dealings with them essentially innocent. But whether this scheme was the sole initiative of Dunkle and Loose, or that they were put up to it by a third party as a plot to destroy Cook’s claim by raising doubts in the minds of the panel just about to sit in judgment of the authenticity of his claim, as many newspaper editorials of the time suggested, is possibly answered by two documents Darrell Hartman recovered. Though not definitive, they strongly suggest that Dunkle and Loose initiated the plot themselves, figuring whichever way events might fall out, they would come out ahead.

I first learned of these documents during consultations Darrell Hartman had with me while in the final stages of preparing his book for publication.

The first document is a letter from George W. Dunkle to William C. Reick. Here is that letter, published for the first time with the permission of the New York Public Library:

Although unsigned, the handwriting is Dunkle’s. The content also confirms he is the author. In it he states “My business has been absolutely paralyzed and I am unable to move until this business is settled.” Dunkle was an insurance agent who lost his job due to the publicity surrounding his sensational affidavit.

According to his affidavit that appeared in full in the New York Times on December 9, 1909, Cook entered into an arrangement with Dunkle to pay him $2,500 for a set of fake celestial observations, to be provided by an indigent Norwegian sea captain named August Loose, “proving” that Cook had been at the North Pole on April 21, 1908, as he had claimed. Another $1,500 was to go to the pair if Loose’s calculations convinced the board of scientists of the University of Copenhagen, to which Cook had promised his data, and which was about to sit in judgment of his “proofs,” that his claim was authenticated by the evidence provided them.

In his affidavit, Dunkle said Cook reneged on his agreement and only paid him $260 before he broke off negotiations and checked out of his hotel without leaving a forwarding address. When his “proofs” were presented to the Consistory in Copenhagen by Cook’s private secretary in late December, they did not contain the observations Loose allegedly provided, however. In fact, they contained no observations whatever, and on that basis, the Danes rejected what Cook submitted as proof of his attainment of the North Pole.

Dunkle certainly must have seen that once he had broached his offer to Cook and Cook had entered into dealings with him, that he was in a can’t-lose position. If Cook went trough with the arrangement, and the Copenhagen panel was convinced by Loose’s calculations, he and Loose stood to make $4,000. If Cook backed out or refused to pay, they still had valuable evidence that they could peddle to the New York newspapers, the obvious first choice being the New York Times, which had exclusive rights to Peary’s first account of his North Pole journey and an editor who had a visceral hatred of his former boss at the Herald, which had the exclusive right’s to Cook’s account. Still, that does not preclude that this scheme was not part of a larger plot.

However, while the two documents don’t disprove Reick’s prior knowledge of Dunkle and Loose’s scheme, they strongly imply that once Reick was approached by Dunkle with his story after Cook reneged, that Reick then went to Thomas Hubbard, and it was his guiding hand, as it had been in all matters concerning the Cook-Peary dispute, that resulted in the eventual appearance of their affidavit in the Times’ columns. That Reick did not have prior knowledge of the scheme is also suggested by a letter I recovered from the Peary Family Papers at the National Archives, asking Peary for a sample of Dr. Cook’s handwriting, apparently to compare with what Dunkle claimed was Dr. Cook’s instructions to Loose as to what he needed in the way of fake observations, which was published in facsimile along with the Dunkle and Loose affidavits. This note to Peary was dated December 6, 1909, which would have been after Cook had checked out of the Hotel Gramatan, where his dealings with Dunkle and Loose were alleged to have taken place. Reick had previously cabled Peary on December 3 that he had “what I consider most important development yet,” suggesting that was when he was first contacted by Dunkle.

It is not stated in Dunkle’s letter to Reick who did the “grilling” it mentions. It’s true that many other newspapers noted with suspicion that this “scoop” appeared in the most anti-Cook of all newspapers, which had a vested interest in seeing Peary declared the victor in the ongoing dispute, but Dunkle’s statement that the Times also “grilled” him and Loose is certainly not applicable to what the Times printed. It is also doubtful that William Reick did any personal grilling, because the person to be satisfied that the story the Times was given by Dunkle was truthful in every respect was the “third man” paying for it, which the two documents Hartmann recovered together certainly point to as Thomas H. Hubbard. This is most forcefully implied by the content of the second document, a receipt and legal release, which states that the details of the affidavits that appeared in the Times were “made originally to Thomas H. Hubbard.” The “grilling” was undoubtedly administered on this occasion.

Hubbard had similarly “grilled” Edward Barrill, Cook’s sole witness to his claim to have been the first to ascent Mt. McKinley in 1906, before he published Barrill’s affidavit in the pages of his own newspaper, which stated that Cook’s McKinley climb was a hoax (see my series of posts on the Barrill Affidavit, beginning on June 13, 2022 below). Barrill had come to New York for that very purpose—to meet with Hubbard personally—and Hubbard managed Barrill’s stay in the city completely, ending it by sending Barrill back to Montana without him ever testifying before a panel appointed by the Explorers Club to look into Cook’s 1906 claim, where he might have said something that would contradict the affidavit Hubbard published.

The letter to Reick, although it bears no date, can be approximately dated from its content. Two weeks after the publication would have been December 23, and it is clear from the letter’s content that the Danes had already made their decision by the time it was written, which was announced on December 21. The letter must therefore have been written after December 23, but before they were paid.

Although the letter still leaves some details hanging, the second document supplies others. It’s a receipt and legal release, dated December 31, 1909, here published for the first time:

(Note: Brown Brothers & Co. was a private investment bank in NYC. It merged in 1931 to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.)

Its content definitely places the date of the letter before the last day of 1909 and leaves no doubt that they were paid well for their scheme, but perhaps not as well as they might have been. It’s interesting that the letter implies that Hubbard told Reick to withhold payment until the Danes decided on Cook’s proofs, suggesting that the amount Dunkle said he had “a gentleman’s agreement” –$2,000–might have been adjusted, depending on Copenhagen’s decision.

All along, Dunkle and Loose might have intended to play both sides of the street. Even if Cook had paid them a significant amount, or especially if the Danes had accepted Loose’s calculations as Cook’s originals and certified his claim to the Pole, the value of the story would have only increased, because revealing that the calculations that won their approval were Loose’s, not Cook’s, would have been iron-clad proof of Cook’s fakery. They might have then turned around and sold their story to the Times for an additional big payday. But Cook never used Loose’s calculations, and, in fact, no one to this day claims to have ever seen them after the face. But neither did he include them, or anything similar to them in the material he sent to Copenhagen in proof of his claim. Therefore, the value of their affidavits to Hubbard was severely diminished, and the final price they received was less than the amount Cook was originally to pay them, according to their affidavit. What they received is equivalent to about $76,500 today.

The documents shown here can be found at the New York Public Library in the New York Times Company Records / Adolph S. Ochs Papers, Box 77, Folder 3. Darrell Hartman’s book, Battle of Ink and Ice, is published by Viking.

The ongoing series on the “Eskimo Testimony” will resume next month.

In early 1997 I was asked to submit a paper for a symposium to be held at Ohio State University in Columbus. The aim of the symposium was to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, led by Adrien de Gerlache. The symposium was jointly sponsored by The Frederick A. Cook Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU.

In 1993 the Cook Society and OSU had held a symposium on Dr. Frederick A. Cook as an explorer which attracted a number of distinguished presenters, including the polar explorer Wally Herbert and the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie. This venture resulted in the decision of the Cook Society to deposit most of their collection of materials related to Frederick Cook in OSU’s Archives.

The Cook Society’s interest in sponsoring the 1997 symposium was that Frederick Cook was the physician and anthropologist of the Belgica expedition, and they saw another opportunity to boost their namesake’s reputation by recounting his positive role in the expedition’s safe return after it became the first expedition to winter inside the Antarctic Circle.

I was invited to be a presenter because the Cook Society had convinced itself that the book I had been writing on Cook since 1989 would vindicate him and establish his later claims to have been the first to climb Alaska’s Mt. McKinley in 1906 and to have attained the North Pole in 1908. There expectations proved unfounded. When my book appeared on February 17, 1997, it did neither of those things. Indeed, it soundly refuted both of those claims after a careful examination of many key original sources that had never been examined before, which showed each to have been a knowing fraud.

If the society had known my conclusions in advance, I would not have been invited, but the invitation had been extended before the book’s publication and could not be withdrawn. Although the society published the proceedings of the earlier 1993 symposium, none of the papers from the 1997 symposium were ever published, possibly because it would have had to include my paper. So now, on the 125th Anniversary, I take this opportunity to publish that unpublished paper for the first time anywhere.

July saw the publication of the third edition of The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook. Originally published in 2013, it had one previous major revision done to it in 2018. The new edition has been a year in preparation.

A number of small errors have been corrected, some sections revised to include new information that has come to light since 2018, and the illustrations have been improved and a few new ones added. For instance, at the author’s request digital scans of the letters Cook left at his winter base in 1908 before starting on his polar attempt were obtained from NARA II. These, along with a number of other items in the papers of Robert E. Peary, were restricted and the holographs were not allowed to be handled. The old illustrations, which were made from microfilm copies, have been replaced by these new digital scans. The probable route map of where Cook actually went instead of the North Pole has been revised in light of a study of a number of sources related to the various stories Cook’s two Inuit companions told of their travels with him in 1908-09. Also, all the indexes have been checked for accuracy, as have all of the internal cross references in the book.

The book contains a transcription of every word in a photographic copy of a now lost notebook I discovered in 1993, which had lain hidden away in an astronomical library in Copenhagen, Denmark for nearly a century. It proved to be the actual field diary Cook kept on his 1908 polar attempt. Besides the transcription, the book contains a careful, detailed and documented analysis and annotation of each page, which proves, absolutely, that Cook could not possibly have attained the North Pole in 1908, as he claimed. The detailed annotations also provide many hidden connections and insights into the notebook’s context and significance that were only possible after the author’s decades of study of this subject.

Cambridge University’s prestigious journal, The Polar Record, published pre-publication extracts from this book in 2013, and The International Journal of Maritime History had this to say of it the finished book: “The meticulous transcription of Cook’s often virtually unreadable handwriting, and the careful analysis of the order of the various layers of text included in the notebook are achievements in themselves, and serve to make this invaluable source readily available to the researcher for the first time.”

The book, which is 425 pages long and contains 200 illustrations, including images of all of the notebook’s pages, is a must for all serious students of the Polar Controversy. It is available on Amazon.com, but the least expensive way to obtain a copy is on eBay. Recently, the cost of printing the book, like everything else, increased, causing the price of the copies available on eBay to go up in response. A copy can be obtained there for $44.95 postpaid.

This is the 21st in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

As we have already seen, the newspapers carried an account saying Ed Barrill had been bribed with $5,000 to make his affidavit against Cook, but that General Hubbard was quoted several times as denying he had received anything for his signature. James Ashton’s only known public comment appeared in the New York Times on October 30, 1909. There he was quoted as saying that Barrill had received $100-$200 for expenses, but that he would have to look it up in his expense books to be sure.

In his chapter “The Mt. McKinley Bribery” in My Attainment of the Pole, Cook contended that Barrill visited Seattle, and in the presence of Seattle Times editor, Joe Blethen, dickered for sums ranging up to $10,000 for an affidavit that would discredit him. Eventually, Cook said, Barrill failed in this attempt, and decamped to Tacoma to meet with James Ashton. Soon after, Cook alleged, he was seen at a Tacoma bank by a witness who claimed he had been passed $1,500 in large bills. For this and “other considerations,” Cook claimed, Barrill had signed the affidavit published in the Globe.

These statements were based on solid evidence. It came in the form of a long letter from one C. O. Anderson, an attorney in Kennewick, WA, who claimed to have interviewed the witness to the Barrill payoff:

H. Wellington Wack, Cook’s lawyer, followed up by visiting this witness in Indiana. He forwarded a summary of what he had found to assist Cook as he was finishing up the text of his book in early 1911:

The affidavits Wack mentions here have as yet not come to light.

Early in October 1909, rumors of plans to bribe Barrill had already induced Cook to take countermeasures. He wrote Barrill enclosing $200 and asking him to meet him in St. Louis on October 6, cautioning him to “Kindly give no press interviews whatsoever.” He also sent Printz $500, paying him his full back wages.

When Cook’s serial story of his conquest of the North Pole had begun to appear in the New York Herald, Roscoe C. Mitchell, one of the paper’s reporters, had been assigned to accompany Cook as his “confidential agent” to watch over the Herald’s interests. Cook now dispatched him, under the direction of his attorney to Missoula, Montana.

At the new Savoy Hotel there, two local lawyers, Col. Tom Marshall of Missoula, and “General” Elbert D. Weed, of Helena, assisted Mittchell in finding witnesses to counter any potential statements made by Barrill.  The lawyers took affidavits from Barrill’s real estate business partner, C. G. Bridgeford and several others. Fred Printz, who reportedly was doing some dickering himself for as much as $1,000, also was interviewed by Cook’s lawyers at the Savoy.  Mitchell was later joined there by Cook and his private secretary, Walter Lonsdale.

Statements by Bridgeford had been published in the New York Herald on October 12. He claimed that Barrill had shown him his Alaskan diary a number of times, and that the story it contained corroborated Cook’s account. When Barrill’s diary was published in the Globe, this proved to be the case, as was Bridgeford’s physical description of the diary, which was completely accurate, giving evidence that he had indeed seen it. He also testified that Barrill had held forth on the climb a number of times and that his story had been consistently the same: that he and Cook had reached the summit of Mt. McKinley. Others in the community verified this was true as well.

These moves did not go unnoticed by Ashton, who had his own agents working the ground in Montana. He wrote to General Hubbard about what he found out and also sought to discredit Bridgeford.

In the copy of My Attainment of the Pole that Cook gave to Weed in 1912, the lawyer made a number of annotations in red ink throughout. On page 534 he confirmed Ashton’s statements, but made the Freudian slip of writing “Bridgman” for “Bridgeford” as one of the men from whom Cook’s contingent obtained affidavits.

“In October 1909, Col. Tom Marshall and myself, at Missoula, Montana, took the affidavits of a number of men – among others of Printz and Bridgman – fully sustaining Dr. Cook in the matter.
(signed) E. D. Weed”

Some have assumed, based on press reports and the discovery of the $5,000 Hubbard bank draft drawn by Ashton among Peary’s papers, that Barrill received the full $5,000 (about $150,000 today), but it should be remembered that Ashton had told Hubbard the amount was to cover “everything.” Everything would include paying off not only Barrill, but also the other four persons whose affidavits the Globe eventually published. It also would include the expenses of various parties, including Walter Miller, who sought out and brought the various wintnesses to Ashton, or arranged the taking of their affidavits. Then there was the cost of having Barrill’s lengthy diary accurately deciphered and transcribed, paying for Barrill and his wife’s trip to New York City, and other expenses such as transportation, lodging and meals for the various sworn witnesses, etc. And this is assuming that none of Ashton’s fees were included in the sum, which well they might have been.

It’s probably accurate then, based on the witness, that Barrill actually received only $1,500, but still a substantial sum. Cook claimed that Printz eventually got $500, after being promised more, and that both Miller and Beecher “were promised large amounts, but were cheated at the ‘showdown.’” Just exactly what the others got is unknown. Cook also claimed Printz tried to sell Roscoe Mitchell an affidavit supporting him for $1,000, was turned down, and later solicited $350 in a letter dated October 12. The letter, which is quoted in Cook’s book on page 525, was among the holdings of the Frederick Cook Society before they were transferred to Ohio State, and presumably is there now.

However, it’s curious that it says it is a “copy” and is on the stationary of the Chittendon Hotel in Columbus, OH, when it is said to have been written at the Savoy in Missoula. For Printz’s part, he denied ever having written such a letter. Because he ended up signing an affidavit for Ashton, we can assume he got nothing from Cook’s side.

The Anderson and Wack letters were in the collection of the Frederick A. Cook Society, presumably now at Ohio State. The undated letter from Cook to Barrill enclosing $200 and the Ashton letter are at NARA II. Weed’s copy of My Attainment of the Pole is the possession of the author.

This is the 20th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

During the Barrills brief visit to New York, they swore out additional affidavits on October 14, 1909, concerning a letter Fanny claimed her husband had received from Dr. Cook, sent from Labrador in July 1907, but which had been misplaced. In their separate affidavits, each claimed the letter in question had promised Barrill “a chunk of the Pole,” and in Ed Barrill’s, if only he would “keep still” about Cook’s Mount McKinley hoax. Here are those two affidavits, published here for the first time:

A third affidavit was sworn by Ed Barrill the same day saying that he had received six letters from Cook since his return from Alaska, affixing five of them to the affidavit, swearing the one that was missing was the fifth in the sequence and was the one to which his wife made reference in her affidavit.

Ashton and Hubbard were very interested in the recovery of this letter. Once back in Montana, the Barrill’s looked high and low and eventually found it. This is what it said:

July 15, ‘07
Battle Harbor, Labrador

Dear Barrille
I am very much surprised at the
tone of your letter. The whole thing has been
to me a drag and a loss. Your money and that
of the others I have picked up dollar after
dollar by hard work but Printz more than
the others has been hired by Disston and I know
he will pay in time. If not when I come
back in Oct. I will go to Philadelphia
and sit down until I get it. I have no
more money in sight. I am trying to make
up for my losses this summer by a trip to
Labrador and Greenland, whether I succeed
or not I will not know until I return in
October.
By this same mail I am writing to a friend
who owes me a hundred dollars to send it
to Printz. This will reach him soon after this
letter.

2

but do urge Printz to write to Disston
often. I am also writing Disston by this mail
to send Printz $400 and thus close the account.
I can do no more – until I return.
I will write you at once when I
get back and will expect you to tell
me about it then but during my absence
do not write about as the letter will
not get to me and only go from place
to place and will be opened by others.
We go from here to Greenland with the arctic
ice and if all goes well the party will
return in about 3 months.

Yours very truly
F. A. Cook

There is not only no mention of “a chunk of the pole,” but Dr. Cook gives no hint that he has any intention of even trying for the North Pole, instead saying twice that he expects to return in October. But what subject did Cook not want Barrill to write about in a letter that might “be opened by others”?

This must be the letter in question, since it fits in by place and by date with the other five, and it is unlikely that Dr. Cook would write another letter to Barrill from Battle Harbour—the last place visited before leaving for Greenland, from which no mail could be sent—on the same day he sailed for the Arctic. And Barrill himself said there was only one letter missing. Therefore, there does not seem to have been a “chunk of the pole” letter at all.

After reading this letter, in a letter dated November 20, Ashton told Hubbard that “I do not see  much to it,” and that “I have Barrill still searching for that lost paper.”   The letter was never published and, apparently, no other letter was ever recovered by the Barrills.

The affidavits and Cook’s letter are in NARA II, College Park, MD.

This is the 19th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

On October 5, after he had taken affidavits from four others bedsides Barrill, Ashton wrote to General Hubbard, misdating his letter by a month as September 5.

Ashton had proposed to General Hubbard that Walter Miller bring the affidavits he had obtained to New York, but Hubbard insisted Ashton, himself, bring them. It would take a few more days to wind up the business, Ashton thought, and wired Hubbard on October 6 that he would be leaving on the Burlington Northern’s Lake shore Century, Friday, October 8.

Meanwhile, the New York Herald, which first announced Cook’s North Pole claim to the world and was then running his serialized account of his conquest, had gotten wind of Ashton’s activities. On October 12th the paper reported from Missoula, Montana: “Edward Barrille, the guide who accompanied Dr. Frederick A. Cook to the top of Mount McKinley, Alaska, in 1906, has been approached, it is asserted here, with an offer of $5,000 to make an affidavit to the effect that the Brooklyn explorer never completed the ascent.”

When the question was put by reporters in New York as to whether an affidavit had been bought, General Hubbard dismissed such reports as “all bosh.” “No money was given to him for his signature,” the general maintained.

Hubbard was eager to publish Barrill’s statement, but when Ashton arrived, Barrill’s affidavit was intentionally held back until Peary published his “proof” that Cook was a liar in the form of alleged testimony given by the only two witnesses along on his polar journey, the two Inuit, Etukishook and Ahwelah.  They were said to have stated that they had never been at the North Pole, and in fact had never been out of sight of land on their entire journey with Cook. This statement was slated for release by the Peary Arctic Club on October 13, so publication of the affidavit was delayed to the next day, October 14. In that way the two statements, Peary and Hubbard hoped, would be the one-two punch that would be a knockout blow to Cook’s credibility.

Barrill’s affidavit was printed in full in the pages of Hubbard’s own newspaper, The New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser.

This was followed the next day by a complete transcription of Edward Barrill’s entire 1906 diary.

The fact that the account sworn in the affidavit did not match that written by Barrill in 1906 was explained away by saying Cook had induced Barrill to doctor his diary to match Cook’s eventual account. Thus Barrill admitted he had conspired to lie at Cook’s direction.

On the 16th, the rest of the affidavits secured by Ashton, those of Fred Printz, Walter Miller, Samuel Beecher and John Shore, were printed in the Globe.

Ed Barrill, himself, accompanied by his wife, Fanny, had followed closely behind his sworn statement, arriving in the city on October 12th . Hubbard brought him to his office, where he conducted a personal interview. The general promised to make Barrill available to a committee of the Explorers Club, of which Peary was the sitting president, that was investigating the doubts being expressed about Cook’s McKinley ascent, which he did the next day at the rooms of the Century Club. Barrill was not made available to the New York press, however. When asked, Hubbard denied knowing where Barrill was staying, and Frederick Dellenbaugh, one of the Explorers Club committee members, said he knew, but refused to disclose Barrill’s location. On October 15th, Hubbard sent word that he saw no need for Barrill to remain longer. Barrill went home with alacrity, never to return, without giving a single press interview.

But in an interview published in the New York Times, General Hubbard elaborated on his intentions in obtaining the affidavits and again discounted any speculation on money being exchanged. He told the Times’ reporter that Barrill “had turned over the diary and made the affidavit impugning Dr. Cook’s word without any monetary inducement as Dr. Cook had intimated in interviews at Atlantic City.” “Barrill told me,” the general went on, “he was tired of hearing Dr. Cook say he had climbed Mount McKinley. That was why he was willing to make the affidavit and give up his diary. He was not coaxed with money. He did it all of his own free will.” And when the reporter persisted, saying, “Dr. Cook has suggested that $5,000 was paid as a bribe to get the affidavit,” Hubbard answered, “Does he? Well let him prove it. It is not so. The affidavit was obtained exactly as every other affidavit is obtained. It was a simple piece of business—that’s all. And what’s more, every word in the affidavit is true.”

Many of the Globe’s readers and other neutral parties remained unconvinced that this was so, however, pointing out that in his affidavit Barrill openly admitted he had been willing to conspire to support a lie concocted by Cook by assenting to it himself. As a result, the immediate impact of Hubbard’s large cash outlay, an amount equivalent to $150,000 today, was far smaller than he and Ashton expected.

Ashton’s misdated letter and telegram are in the National Archives II, College Park, MD

This is the 18th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

In all of the Polar Controversy, perhaps the most telling piece of evidence produced against Frederick Cook’s claim to have discovered the North Pole had nothing to do with his 1908 polar expedition. It came instead out of his previous expedition to Alaska in 1906, which was aimed at the first ascent of the tallest peak in North America. At its conclusion, he announced that he and his burly packer, Edward N. Barrill, were the first to reach the summit of Mt. McKinley on September 16 of that year. That claim led directly to Dr. Cook being feted at the annual dinner of the National Geographic Society in Washington, being elected the second president of the Explorers Club of New York, two well-remunerated articles in Harper’s Monthly Magazine and a contract to write a book about the exploit. It also led indirectly to his obtaining the backing of the wealthy gambler John R. Bradley for his attempt to reach the North Pole the following year. But in its immediate wake, it had left Cook flat broke.

Cook’s Alaskan journey had been sponsored by the millionaire Philadelphia saw manufacturer, Henry Disston, who gave him financial support in exchange for Cook’s organizing a big game hunt for him at the expedition’s conclusion. However, Disston had a change of mind, failed to show up for the hunt, and so did his money. But Cook had already contracted to rent a pack train for the prospective hunt, and when he tried to cancel this arrangement without paying, he was hauled into Alaskan court and lost, wiping out all his cash on hand. As a result, he could only give the men he had hired to enable his attempt to climb the mountain promises to pay in the future rather than what he owed them then and there. When Cook went off with Bradley to the Arctic in July 1907 and didn’t come back, all those debts were still outstanding, and remained so until after his return to the United States in September 1909, after claiming he had attained the North Pole on April 21 of the previous year. Those unpaid debts were to be his undoing as it turned out.

As there were doubts from his first announcement of his polar conquest, there had also been doubts in Alaska that Cook had actually made the summit as he claimed. Some of these were simply the result of envy. Many Alaskans thought the mountain unclimbable, and resented the idea that some “effete” Easterner from “the Outside” could have come and so easily plucked the prize that the Sourdoughs and Pioneers of Alaska coveted for themselves. No one had real evidence that Cook had not actually done the deed, but there were some reasons that fed these suspicions beyond pure jealousy. Cook’s timetable for the climb, which he gave before a meeting of the Mazamas in Seattle shortly after his return, seemed too short and too pat for the accomplishment of such a titanic undertaking. The only member of Cook’s own expedition who voiced public doubt, however, was Herschel Parker, who had returned from Alaska after being assured by Cook that no further attempt to climb the mountain would be made that season. But after Cook met with him upon reaching New York, Parker seemed persuaded that Cook had indeed climbed the mountain, but the nature of his accomplishment, Parker felt, was only that of a sporting event, with few of the scientific results Parker hoped to obtain from the conquest.

But as the Polar Controversy grew between Cook and Robert Peary over who had been first to the Pole, many saw opportunities developing to exploit their former associations with Frederick Cook in Alaska and get their back pay they were due—or perhaps even more. J. E. Shore, a U.S. Commissioner in Leavenworth, WA, alerted Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, that Cook’s unpaid debts might provide useful fodder to use against Cook.

Bridgman passed on Shore’s letter and enclosures indicating that several of Cook’s former expedition members had complained of Cook still owing them back wages to General Thomas H. Hubbard, the Peary Arctic Club’s president. Hubbard immediately engaged his law correspondent in Tacoma, James M. Ashton, to act on his behalf to obtain affidavits concerning what they knew about Cook’s Alaskan claims. After all, if it could be shown that Cook had not actually reached the summit of Mt. McKinley, that would set a glaring precedent for a dishonest claim to have reached the North Pole. No doubt, however, Hubbard realized that the key figure among those named by Shore in his letter was Barrill, because he alone had been with Cook in the days immediately before and after September 16, 1906, and so he alone knew for sure the truth or falsity of Cook’s claim to “the top of the continent.”

James M. Ashton

Ashton later reported that he had indeed been hired by Hubbard to seek out these men, but denied his efforts had a predetermined agenda. “I received word from Gen. Hubbard to ascertain the exact truth concerning Dr. Cook’s climb of Mount McKinley and had not the remotest idea what side I was on or would be on,” he told the New York Globe on October 16. “I sent [Walter] Miller [who had been the photographer on Cook’s 1906 expedition] to Barrill and other members of the expedition and had them brought to Tacoma. They were all carefully examined. Barrill spoke openly and squarely from the start.” However, this is not exactly the way things actually went down.

As Ashton met with the various expedition members, he kept up a running report on his progress via telegraph with Hubbard. On September 21 he reported:

[“Armstrong” was William Armstrong, one who assisted Cook with his 1906 pack train.]

September 25:

September 27:

September 30:

[Difficulties account parties increasing claims Make sure protect drafts which will run over amount stated [i.e. $2,000]. Many interferences causing continuance wild demands and indecision of parties.]

October 1:

On that day Ashton drew a customer’s draft for $5,000 on the Fidelity Trust Company of Tacoma, charged to the account of Thomas H. Hubbard, 60 Wall St., NY.

All the items reproduced here except the portrait of James Ashton are in the Peary Family Papers at National Archives II, College Park, MD.

This is the 17th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

Of all the bizarre incidents of the Polar Controversy, perhaps none has more unanswered questions surrounding it than the Dunkle-Loose affidavits. On December 7, 1909, the day after the so-called “proofs” of Dr. Cook’s polar attainment had been locked away in a Copenhagen bank vault, two men signed a lengthy affidavit at Westchester, NY, claiming that they had been hired by Frederick Cook to fabricate a set of astronomical observations that would convince a panel of Danish scientists about to sit to consider Cook’s proofs that he had reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. Cook had agreed to send them first to the University of Copenhagen in appreciation for the acclaim and honorary degree he had received there when he landed at the Danish capital in September 1909, after wiring from Lerwick, Shetland Islands, that he had attained the Pole.

The New York Times, which had been vehemently pro-Peary since the start of the controversy, ran the exclusive story December 8; it covered nearly three full pages—by far the most space devoted to any one story on a single day that whole year—that spared its readers no details of the alleged transaction. Those details are related fully in the pages of Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, so there is no need to take them up again here. In the end, after the Danes had examined the materials submitted by Cook, they ruled that they did not contain any proof he had reached the North Pole, but no trace of the calculations Loose said he had provided the doctor, a copy of which the Times had thoughtfully forwarded to Copenhagen, could be found in them either. As a result, although the University’s verdict on the value of Cook’s proofs was devastating to his credibility, the elaborate affidavit became a non-factor in settling the questions surrounding the explorer’s claims.

In their affidavit, the two men claimed that Cook paid them only a fraction of the agreed upon $4,000 price ($100,000 in today’s money) that they asked if their efforts resulted in the explorer’s claim being accepted by the Danes. In all, they received a mere $240 from Cook. What they may have received for their affidavit from the Times is unknown, but considering the length of it, one could reasonably conclude it was considerably more than they got from Cook. The unnatural recall of detail included in their statement indicates they kept very precise notes and that their real intention may not have been to help the explorer prove his claim, but rather was designed to destroy his credibility by exposing his secret efforts to artificially bolster what inadequate original proofs he already had, if any. Even so, that same detail make it unbelievable that the story their affidavits contained was a fabrication. And even Cook’s private secretary acknowledged that Cook had met with Dunkle and Loose.

It is even possible that the pair was put up to it by William C. Reick, an editor at the Times who had an old score to settle with his former employer, James Gordon Bennett, owner of the rival New York Herald. Letters in the National Archives II between Reick, Bridgman and Peary suggest as much. The Herald was the most important paper in the city at the time, and had printed Cook’s original dispatch claiming his discovery, and it also ran his detailed serialized account of his feat. It therefore had a large stake in the establishment of the legitimacy of Cook’s claim, which from its first announcement had been questioned by pro-Peary forces, and it had much to lose if Cook’s claim was discredited.

William C. Reick

Whatever they got from Reick, it was apparently all they got. As a result of the unwanted publicity, George W. Dunkle, who worked for a New York insurance company, and who had originally approached Cook with a proposition of insuring his original “proofs,” was dismissed from his job. August Wedel Loose, an itinerant sea captain who Dunkle introduced to Cook, and who claimed that he worked up the bogus calculations, seems to have fared little better. In January 1910 he wrote to Herbert L. Bridgman, editor of the Brooklyn Standard Union and secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, which bankrolled Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole:

Shortly after, Loose left the United States, never to be heard of again.

Not only are the exact origins of the Dunkle-Loose affidavits shrouded in mystery, but also are the men themselves. After their 15 minutes of fame in the Times, the pair dropped totally from sight—literally and figuratively. During the years of research I spent in preparing Cook & Peary, I never saw a single photograph of either man. None appeared in the New York Times, or apparently anywhere else, until recently I recovered a copy of a press photo from an Ebay auction site that sells off photographs from the morgues of various defunct newspapers. As far as I know, it is published here for the first time and gives us our first look at these two slippery characters in the flesh. (Loose is the one with the mustache on the left).

The origins of the picture can be surmised from the back of the photo, which bears this penciled inscription: “Capt. Loose and Dunkle who revealed Dr. Cook’s effort to have them prepare a ‘log’ for him.” The photo is backstamped “Nov. 16, 1910,” or nearly a year after the New York Times story broke. Apparently, it came from the morgue of the Cleveland Press, indicated by another backstamp, which reads: “N.E.A. Reference Department, Press bldg, Cleveland.” N.E.A. stands for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a syndication service started in 1902 that supplied comics and pictorial matter to hundreds of newspapers nationwide. It is the only such syndication service still in business.

The Loose letter is in the Peary Family Papers at NARA II, College Park, Md.  The photo of Dunkle and Loose is the possession of the author.