I love the ad he placed in the paper, it was perfect. "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of succes"
I'm interested to know whether this is a collective false memory, like Berenstein Bears, or if it's true and misattributed.
That web page starts when a bunch of stuff wasn't available in digital form (people speak about scanning microfiche) so maybe they're all just looking in the wrong places.
There's probably some distributed historian project waiting to happen - OCRing and proof-reading all the ads in all the newspapers, and then mining that data.