Cook at once campaigned for the legislature and was elected in 1864, taking his seat on January 2, 1865 when the Twenty-fourth General Assembly convened. It was the second time this member of the Republican Party was elected from a county that had always favored the Democratic Party.

The legislature, pleased with the performance of the Sanitary Bureau in aiding soldiers in the field, voted favorably February 16, 1865 on a bill that would provide a state agency designed especially to aid and benefit the volunteers of Illinois. Governor Richard J. Oglesby was authorized by the new law to appoint and commission military agents "to be stationed at such places, within the rebellious states or elsewhere, as in their opinion, will best promote the interests of the volunteer forces of the United States Army from this state." Major Cook, being one of the nine men appointed and commissioned, now became a colonel. He and another colonel by the name of Baumgardner spent the spring of 1865 in New York where they attended to the needs of Illinois soldiers in the various hospitals. Later Colonel Cook was sent to Washington, D. C.

In Washington Col. Cook's job required an unusual amount of ability, tact and energy. It involved representing the state of Illinois in the complicated task of collecting bounty money for Civil War veterans, prior to the formation of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veteran's organization finally assuming this and other service work. During the six years Col. Cook was the veteran representative, he collected over $800,000, $325,000 for the state and over $500,000 for Illinois soldiers and their families. Harry Dewitt Cook never returned to Kappa from Washington, but he had attained the highest rank of any local soldier who served in the Civil War.

George Curtiss was a natural born newspaper man who gave El Paso a fine weekly publication subscribers read avidly. It was "meaty" and well balanced and free from sensationalism. The man responsible for The El Paso Journal's popularity and reputation was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1859, the son of Samuel T. and Kate Curtiss. He came to El Paso in 1864 with his parents, attended our local schools, and in 1889 married Catherine McLafferty, the ceremony taking place in Hutchinson, Kansas. One child, a son named Cedric, died before he reached his second birthday. Mrs. Curtiss passed away in 1935, to be followed eleven years later by her husband.

El Paso was always "home" to George R. Curtiss except for brief periods when he worked at the printer's trade in Peoria, Streator and Kansas City, Missouri. Being ambitious to launch a business of his own, Mr. Curtiss prevailed upon a friend to be his partner in establishing and publishing The Saturday Review, a newspaper which they sold to the El Paso Journal in the early 1880's. Curtiss then became associated with the Journal, and in 1889 he and Robert J. Evans

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