A movie script? Not at all—these are the essentials of the life of James H. Cook. Known as “Captain,” James Cook became the owner, in 1887, of the Agate Springs Ranch, founded earlier by his father-in-law. Under Cook’s watchful eye, the ranch prospered and became a second home both for the Oglala Sioux and for paleontologists bent on excavating the fossilized remains of the life of 20 million years ago, found here along the Niobrara River in western Nebraska.
This land, now encompassing Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, is punctuated with low bluffs ascending westward toward the Rockies. It is a land of sharp contrasts, of cool, inviting riverbanks and parched ridges, the most famous of which are the fossil-bearing Carnegie and University Hills. The surrounding grassy plains are a tapestry of wild grasses—prairie sandreed, blue grama, little bluestem, and needle-and-thread. The wildflowers lupine, spiderwort, western wallflower, sunflower, and penstemon add touches of blue, purple, orange, yellow, and red to the tapestry. In summer the dark green spears of the small soapweed, a yucca, dot the brown grasses of the hillsides. And just as they did more than 20 million years ago, cottonwoods and willows provide shade and shelter for birds and other animals along the river.
Professor Othniel C. Marsh, back row center, of Yale University and his students look as if they are equipped for a frontier hunting expedition. But instead of looking for live animals in the West, they were hunting for fossilized remains of ancient beasts. Marsh and his crews made many such trips, and it was on one early trip that Cook and Marsh met, in Sioux country.
Professor Marsh and the great Sioux chief Red Cloud greet each other in New Haven in 1880.
Professor Edward Drinker Cope competed with Marsh for the best fossils. He once made the mistake of reconstructing a skeleton hind end foremost; Marsh never let him forget it.
Looking out over the rippling grasses, you grasp the fact that Nebraska is larger than all of New England and feel the awesome spaciousness of the Great Plains. The word “distance” has a different meaning here than it does in the East. When James Cook came to the upper Niobrara River, the closest town was Cheyenne, Wyoming—more than 160 kilometers (100 miles) to the southwest.
It was there, in Cheyenne, that Cook met Dr. Elisha B. Graham in 1879, the year Graham selected this land for a cattle ranch as an investment and as a summer retreat for his family. Graham named the place the 04 Ranch, apparently because it is near the 104th meridian. Cook visited the ranch often in the early 1880s and courted Elisha and Mary Graham’s daughter Kate. They were married in 1886 and lived near Socorro, New Mexico, for a year before returning to Nebraska with their newborn child, Harold, and buying the ranch from Dr. Graham, who moved to California.