papers and agreed that Meighen Island was a Cook discovery. It is known as the only island to be discovered by a United States expedition in the North American arctic. For more detail see Bryce (1997) and Henderson (2005). The conflicting claims of Cook and Peary prompted Roald Amundsen to take extensive precautions in navigation during his South Pole expedition so there could be no doubt concerning attainment of the pole if successful. Amundsen also had the advantage of traveling over a continent. He left unmistakable evidence of his presence at the South Pole, whereas any ice on which Cook might or might not have camped would have drifted many miles in the year between the competing claims. At the end of his 1911 memoir, Cook wrote: "I have stated my case, presented my proofs. As to the relative merits of my claim, and Mr. Peary's, place the two records side by side. Compare them. I shall be satisfied with your decision." Reputation Cook's reputation never recovered from the attacks on his claim. While Peary's North Pole claim was widely accepted for most of the 20th century, it has since been discredited by a variety of reviewers, including the National Geographic Society, which long supported him. Cook spent the next few years defending his claim and threatening to sue writers who said that he had faked the trip. Researching the complicated story of the conflicting claims, the writer Robert Bryce began to assess how the men's personalities and goals were in contrast, and evaluated them against the period of the Gilded Age. He believes that Cook, as a physician and ethnographer, cared about the people on his expedition and admired the Inuit. Bryce writes that Cook "genuinely loved and hungered for the real meat of exploration—mapping new routes and shorelines, learning and adapting to the survival techniques of the Eskimos, advancing his own knowledge—and that of the world—for its own sake." But, he could not find supporters to help finance the expeditions without a goal that was more flashy. There was tremendous pressure on each man to be the first to reach the Pole, in order to gain financial support for continued expeditions. Fraud trial In 1919, Cook started promoting startup oil companies in Fort Worth. In April 1923, Cook and 24 other Fort Worth oil promoters were indicted in a federal crackdown on fraudulent oil company promotions. Three of