By Hank Nuwer
When federal prisoner Frederick A. Cook was released from a Leavenworth prison in March of 1930, he had $50 in his billfold, which was, at age 65, his entire life savings.
His accomplishments in that long lifetime were considerable. And he once was a man of means.
Born to German immigrants in Sullivan County, New York, on June 10, 1865, he and his family changed their surname from Koch to Cook.
From the outset, he thirsted for adventure.
When Robert Edwin Peary launched an expedition to explore Greenland in 1891-1892, he brought along Cook as a surgeon and ethnologist. He was credited for saving the health of crew members by urging all of them to survive on seal meat and oil to prevent scurvy.
In 1897, Cook signed up as the physician on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition. They traveled on a whaling ship called the Belica. One of his fellow explorers was Roald Amundsen, later to gain fame for an expedition to the South Pole.
Cook apparently never could get his fill of adventure.
For certain, he had a pathological need to achieve worldwide glory.
Even if he had to lie to get a slice of fame.
In 1906, he launched an expedition to climb Mt. McKinley (Denali).
While his fellow explorers remained in camp, he climbed upward on his own.
Then came down, claiming he had conquered McKinley despite sub-zero temperatures.
Yes, he achieved glory, but many veteran climbers doubted his story from the beginning.
And, within two years, when it turned out the photos he’d taken as evidence were snapped significantly below the summit, Cook was universally branded a fraud by an investigating team of experts.
His notoriety grew when he claimed to have beaten Admiral Peary to discover the North Pole in 1908. Another committee rejected his scant evidence.
Facing financial ruin, he toured vaudeville theaters across America to lecture on his many adventures, never conceding that he’d never reached the top of McKinley or set his snowshoes on the North Pole.
Worse, he ventured into a Texas get-rich oil scheme and his lies and embellishments brought him down in 1923. Convicted of mail fraud, he paid a $10,000 fine and received a 14-year sentence in Leavenworth. His second wife (the first died young), Marie Fidele Hunt, divorced him to rear their two daughters as soon as the verdict was rendered.
At Leavenworth, the physician made him self useful treating fellow patients. He grew particularly interested in helping those with a narcotics’ addiction.
Cook served five of fifteen years in federal prison.
Upon his release in 1930 he said this: “Coming from the jungle of penaldom, we must for some time feel like wild animals who have lost their way.”
He soon entered into the cold storage business in Dallas, Texas, with a former fellow prisoner who was guilty of a notorious street robbery.
Just before Book died in 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Cook a presidential pardon.
Cook died in New York State on August 5, 1940.
Few men who climbed to such heights ever sank so low as he.
Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. His newest publication is the foreword to Cultures of Sport Hazing and Anti-Hazing Initiatives for the 21st Century edited by Jessica Chin and Jay Johnson.