2024 Table Of Contents 2023 Table Of Contents 2022 Table Of Contents 2021 Table Of Contents Home About Contact Index
The last stop of our day was really neat, with the visitors center having a nice display of some of the fossils that have been found there. Once again, lots of pictures were taken. There is also a good video to watch that fills you in on the history of the monument as well as the fossils. Although Cindy and I were in the area during our 2021 travel season we were not able to see the museum as it was closed due the covid nightmare that our government used to make our lives miserable.
From the website () In the early 1900s, paleontologists unearthed the Age of Mammals when they found full skeletons of extinct Miocene mammals in the hills of Nebraska -- species previously only known through fragments.
At the same time, an age of friendship began between rancher James Cook and Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota.
These two unprecedented events are preserved and protected here... at Agate Fossil Beds.
While the earliest paleontologists visited and worked at the Agate Springs Bone Bed quarries, other surprising friends of James Cook gathered at his ranch house, 3 miles west of the fossil beds. These visitors made a 150-mile wagon trip from the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was the legendary Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota, and other members of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes, who had years earlier led his warriors and allies in raids and epic battles against U.S. encroachment onto their lands.
Tents and tipis were erected alongside the Niobrara River, where the Lakota and Cheyenne guests told stories, danced, tanned hides and exchanged the gifts which now make up the James H. Cook Collection here at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.
For decades after, residents and visitors to the region came to the Agate Springs Ranch to see the amazing craftsmanship and historical importance of these gifts. Red Cloud's chief shirt and his own personal moccasins, the magnificent large peace pipe from the Fort Laramie treaty negotiations, and American Horse's war club from the Fetterman Fight. All these are now on display here at Agate Fossil Beds as part of the Cook Collection.
James first found fossils in the hills near his ranch in the 1880s. Chance encounters with paleontologists such as O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, then excavating in the American West, stimulated James' interest in the fossil bed above that he brought to the attention of later paleontologists.
In 1876, James traveled to Montana to locate good hunting and trapping grounds. From 1878 to 1882, after finishing his last trail drive from Texas to Crow Creek, Colorado, he worked in Wyoming, where he guided parties of hunters seeking big game in the Rocky, Big Horn, and Laramie mountains. During these same years, he again met O. C. Marsh, who was exploring for and discovering fossils in the region. These meetings with Marsh and his rival, the Philadelphia-based paleontologist E. D. Cope, sparked James' interest in fossils. It was an interest kept alive, and maybe even deepened, while James worked in New Mexico as manager of the WS Ranch between 1882 and 1887.
James' New Mexico obligations didn't keep him away from Nebraska, though. In the mid 1880s, he found fossils in the vicinity of today's Carnegie and University Hills while out riding horseback with his sweetheart Kate Graham, whose father, Elisha, owned the northwest Nebraska ranch soon to become the Cook family's home. Married in 1886, James and Kate resided briefly in New Mexico. The next year, Kate by then pregnant with their first child, the couple returned to Nebraska, where James purchased his father-in-law's 04 Ranch, which he christened the Agate Springs Ranch after discovering moss agate near the springs flowing into the Niobrara River west of the ranch house. They started their ranching business with race horses and cattle. When raising and training horses proved unprofitable, James devoted his energy to cattle rearing. He also planted dozens, maybe even a hundred or more, cottonwood trees around the ranch house. To create this Agate Springs Ranch oasis in the otherwise treeless mixed-grass prairie, James watered the trees by hand until established. As the ranch grew, James continued to explore the nearby breaks and buttes; he even invited paleontologists to the ranch, where they found Paleocastor burrows known now as Daemonelix formations and confirmed his discovery of today's globally famous 19.2 million-year-old bonebed in Carnegie and University Hills.
In this environment, James and Kate raised two boys, Harold (b. 1887) and John (b. 1898). Harold, later educated at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Columbia University, became interested in fossils and aided paleontologists like Erwin H. Barbour, Olaf A. Peterson, and Albert Thomson when they visited and excavated in the area. John, the younger son, died in 1918, at the age of 20, after contracting influenza while attending the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. James' older brother, John, who'd come to live with him, served for many years as the postmaster of the Agate Post Office, which was located at the ranch; he was preceded in that post by Kate's mother, Mary.
During his ranching years, James remained involved in a myriad of activities. He applied progressive ideas that he learned while growing up with his Quaker foster family and, later, from the many farming and ranching publications to which he subscribed. He was one of the first ranchers in western Nebraska to use irrigation to improve his hay crop yields. His natural curiosity, meanwhile, led him to maintain a lively interest in not only the area's fossil discoveries but also the histories and cultures of the region's Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne, and other American Indian residents. With Red Cloud's visits to the ranch between the late 1880s and 1908, Cook's friendship with the aging chief and his family and friends grew. Red Cloud himself presented many gifts to James and his family, including items made especially for the Cooks and ones of great significance to the Red Clouds and the Oglala Lakota. In honor of Red Cloud's request, James preserved and displayed these items in the ranch house, showing them often to neighbors and visitors. James' desire to protect these artifacts for his friend contributed to the eventual creation of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, where they're on exhibit today.
After a long, varied, and interesting life, James Cook died in 1942, at the age of 85. Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, his 1923 autobiography published by Yale University Press, records many of James' memories of life and adventure in the West. The book is available for sale today in the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument bookstore.
Good day with Cindy, Diane and Linda. Used Linda's car for today's tour of over 300 miles, so we will need to pitch in on fuel tomorrow. Everybody seemed to enjoy the day, which started at 7am, and we got back to the rigs about 6pm. Unloaded the car and ate supper, plus helped Linda get hoses strung out to fill the water in her rig. Tomorrow is another long day, so we will all hopefully get a good night's rest.
For more details about our adventures click on the links at the top of the page.
Copyright 2024 pcpomtravels.com