Researching Frank Cowan

He was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania to Lucetta Oliver and Edgar Cowan, a local lawyer. He studied at Jefferson College, but faculty there expelled him for a prank. In 1861, however, he moved to Washington, D.C. to join his father, who was newly elected as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania. His father gave him a clerk position on the Committee on Patents. During this formative period Cowan studied law (he was admitted in 1865 to the Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania bar), and also became a writer of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama.

In April 1867 President Andrew Johnson appointed the 22-year-old Cowan as his personal secretary for managing land patents. He worked for Johnson for the next year and a half, then opened his own law practice in Washington after Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson. At this time he also started to study medicine at Georgetown Medical College, from which he graduated in 1869. He returned to Greensburg later that year and married Harriet Jack, daughter of U.S. Congressman William Jack. He opened both a law and medical practice there, and also started a newspaper, Frank Cowan's Paper, focused on Western Pennsylvania and which he edited and published for three years.

In 1873 his wife died after child birth, as would the infant son Jack. Cowan then became ill himself, and after a time sought relief by sailing around the world in 1880-81, and again in 1884-85, writing about Australia, Brazil, Hawaii, India, Korea, and New Zealand.

He gained some notoriety in 1867 when he partnered with Thomas Birch Florence to write and publish a literary hoax. This scheme to sell newspapers for Florence's struggling Georgetown newspaper did cause sales to skyrocket. The hoax claimed the discovery of the body of an Icelandic Christian woman, who had died in 1051, below the Great Falls of the Potomac River, proving that America had been "discovered" five centuries before Christopher Columbus.

In 1904, knowing that he was terminally ill, Cowan conceived another media hoax connected to the Viking hoax of his youth. He contracted a local carpenter, John Walthour, to build him a model of a fire ship, the funeral vessel of Vikings chiefs. He then gave instructions to be buried beneath a tree at the summit Tollgate Hill, from which he would sail symbolically "over the Sea of Appalachia . . . ."

Cowan died in Greensburg and was buried in St. Clair Cemetery. Even his New York Times obituary had to note that his Viking burial had not taken place. After his death, his estate atop Tollgate Hill was donated to the city of Greensburg for use as a park called Mt. Odin. The clubhouse of the golf course there is named for him.