He built a reputation as a generous and helpful citizen, but following the death of his first wife, his family began to fall apart and his finances suffered, and he died intestate with little of his fortune left.
His first wife was the niece of author James Fenimore Cooper, whose time spent at Comstock's house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, helped inspire his novel The Oak Openings.
[4] While he was visiting Cooperstown in June 1834, James Fenimore Cooper met Comstock, who he found to be a "respectable young man".
Comstock persuaded him to invest in land as equal partners with him, though Cooper was putting up all the capital, in the form of a $6,000 line of credit he obtained in May 1835 from City Bank of New York, secured with personal notes from Gorham A.
As Ketchum's own financial fortunes faded, he in turn substituted additional instruments that blurred the responsibility for the debt to the point that Comstock and Cooper spent many years in court trying to recover their money.
[6] These legal battles required Cooper to make five trips to Michigan beginning in June 1847, including three visits to Kalamazoo to check on a number of properties that Comstock had transferred to him in 1841 as partial repayment.
Comstock was elected as a Democrat to represent Kalamazoo County in the new Michigan Senate, and was re-elected twice, serving four years in total.
Comstock himself died at Ossining on March 15, 1861; he was intestate, and his brother Daniel petitioned to become executor of the estate, which he estimated to be less than $1,000 (equivalent to $33,911 in 2023[2]).
[8] Following his wife Sarah's death in 1846, Comstock sent his children to live with relatives, and put one up for adoption, before moving back to New York.
He was killed on August 16, 1868, while trying to negotiate peace with a Cheyenne chief named Turkey Leg during the violence that followed a raid on Saline Valley the previous week.