Agate Fossil Beds Administrative History

CHAPTER 1:
THE COOKS OF AGATE SPRINGS RANCH (continued)

Discovery of the Fossil Hills Quarries

On September 28, 1886, Captain James H. Cook married Kate Graham, the daughter of Cheyenne physician Elisha Barker (E. B.) and Mary Eliza Hutchison Graham. Cook first met the Grahams during his Cheyenne hunting days when he courted and fell in love with Kate. Living in New Mexico, Cook found many reasons to travel to Cheyenne to see Kate. If the Grahams were not at their home in Cheyenne, he rode to their "0 4 Ranch" in Sioux County, Nebraska, where the family usually spent the summers. Established by Dr. Graham with 5,000 cattle in early 1878, the 0 4 (presumably named because the ranch was near the 4th Meridian) was close to the Niobrara crossing of the Fort Laramie-Fort Robinson military road.

James and Kate Cook returned to the W S Ranch in New Mexico after their marriage in 1886, but soon sold their interests and returned to Cheyenne after Kate became pregnant. On July 3, 1887, Harold James Cook was born. When Harold was only six weeks old, Cook took his wife, son, and mother-in-law* to the 04 Ranch to live; Cook had purchased his father-in-law's squatters right to 160 acres of the 0 4 Ranch. [2]

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*Mary Eliza Graham, a matriarchal figure, preferred living with either of her two daughters for parts of each year. When her husband left Wyoming for California, she spent each summer with the Cooks at the Agate Springs Ranch. Mrs. Graham served as Agate postmistress from 1899 to 1902 and 1906 to 1909. In the 1910s, she moved to California with her daughter's (Clara Graham Heath) family. Mrs. Graham died on January 31, 1937. See Karen Zimmerman, The Cook Papers Collection, 1984.

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The ranch's designation was changed to the "Agate Springs Ranch" in honor of the native moss agates and the numerous springs in the Niobrara River Valley. They planted hundreds of trees (young saplings from along the Platte River); cottonwood and willows particularly thrived. A new ranch house, designed by Kate Graham Cook, was built in 1893. New furniture for the home was selected when the family visited the Columbian Exposition/World's Fair in Chicago where they also selected china, silver, cut glass, and rugs. The new goods were then shipped via railroad to western Nebraska.

James H. Cook began his ranching operation with roadsters, draft and saddle horses, and red and black polled cattle. He was determined to make the remote Agate Springs Ranch an economically viable operation. When a neighboring ranch folded, he bought it, expanded his holdings, and built extensive irrigation ditches. When it became evident horse breeding was not turning a profit, Cook concentrated on raising Angus cattle. [3]

It was during their courtship [circa 1878] that James Cook and Kate Graham first discovered the fossil deposits later to become known as Agate Fossil Beds. In Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, James H. Cook recounts the discovery:

Riding one day along the picturesque buttes which skirt the beautiful valley of the Niobrara, we came to two high conical hills about three miles from the ranch house. From the tops of these hills there was an unobstructed view of the country for miles up and down the valley. Dismounting and leaving the reins of our bridles trailing on the ground... we climbed the steep side of one of the hills. About halfway to the summit we noticed many fragments of bones scattered about on the ground. I at once concluded that at some period, perhaps years back, an Indian brave had been laid to his last long rest under one of the shelving rocks near the summit of the hill, and that, as was the custom among some tribes of Indians at one time, a number of his ponies had been killed near his body. Happening to notice a peculiar glitter on one of the bone fragments. I picked it up and I then discovered that it was a beautifully petrified piece of the shaft of some creature's leg bone. The marrow cavity was filled with tiny calcite crystals, enough of which were exposed to cause the glitter which had attracted my attention. Upon our return to the ranch we carried with us what was doubtless the first fossil material ever secured from what are now known to men of science as the Agate Springs Fossil Quarries. [4]

Although James Cook reported the discovery to the Wyoming Territorial and Nebraska State Geologists, no paleontologist evaluated the fossil quarries until 1892, when Dr. E. H. Barbour of the University of Nebraska visited the Agate Springs Ranch. Because Barbour's principal interest were the daemonilices ("Devil's Corkscrews"), he sent an inexperienced student assistant to investigate the weathered-out bones four miles distant from the ranch. Barbour's student misinterpreted what he uncovered there; the field team moved on after its brief stop and the fossilized treasures of the Agate Fossil Beds remained undiscovered.

A decade passed before Cook met J. B. Hatcher of Princeton University and O. A. Peterson of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum. Both were collecting fossils in the Sioux County badlands when the chance meeting with James H. Cook took place in Harrison, Nebraska. Cook told the paleontologists about the fossil deposit near Agate. Because they were engaged in their own field work and the collecting season was over, neither man came to the Agate Springs Ranch. Although Hatcher died in July 1904, O. A. Peterson finally arrived at Agate at the end of that summer. Seventeen-year-old Harold J. Cook led Peterson's wagon by horseback to the quarries. After a preliminary investigation, Peterson rode back to the ranch, shouting gleefully to an assistant: "Put the team in the barn! We aren't going anywhere!" Returning to the quarries, Harold Cook helped Peterson uncover more bones. The deposit was rich; the men found fossilized bones of a rhinoceros-like animal hitherto unknown to science. Peterson thus become the first professional paleontologist to discover the wonderful potential of the Agate Fossil Beds.

Because of the site's importance, a homestead petition was filed in the name of Harold J. Cook who built a crude cabin near the quarries to establish his legal claim. The structure, which became known as the Harold J. Cook Homestead Cabin, or Bone Cabin, is extant.