Staking a Claim to the Bed of Bones

Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

James H. Cook already owned miles of lush green, treeless wetland along western Nebraska’s butte-bordered Niobrara River. One wouldn’t think he and his son Harold needed more land to pasture Black Angus and horses. They irrigated fields planted with alfalfa and hay; most years, they harvested enough to sell to neighboring ranchers when their need was greatest, the price highest. The land claimed in 1908 was un-owned and unfenced. It was 640 acres of short- and mixed-grass prairie, open range with hills that couldn’t be irrigated. Others had wanted the land, the hills.

During summer and winter throughout the High Plains, ranchers ran cattle on unclaimed prairie once range to the nearly extinct bison. In desert-like country too arid for agriculture, such practices were as common as greed and the desire to control access to water. Cattlemen fenced in the public domain. To discourage newcomers, hopeful homesteaders, they circulated stories about scarcity and hunger, about isolation. Beneath expansive blue skies spackled white with cloud, sometimes someone shot and killed a homesteader. Sometimes rains came, but with them too came lightning and as much chance for all-consuming fire as cultivation and survival. Of the thousands who’d arrived and claimed land, many eventually left or sold out, defeated by too little rainfall, failed crops, and fear.

Newspapers carried accounts of conflicts, range wars. They were stories of Biblical proportions, i.e. typical America tales: The haves versus the have-nots, David versus Goliath. A century before the present, the government backed the little guy. In 1902, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the Secretary of the Interior, ordered cattlemen to remove fence illegally enclosing public lands and water. Cattlemen and their supporters resisted, seeking exemption and reversal. With the Kinkaid Act’s passage, federal lawmakers expected more of the same: illegal land-grabs by large cattle interests. Was this what the Cooks did? Grabbed land?

In 1862, Congress had passed the Homestead Act to encourage western settlement and the spread of agriculture. In exchange for five-year’s residency and documented improvements amounting to at least $1.25 per acre—plowed up prairie and planted crops, for instance—Americans and naturalized citizens could receive up to 160 acres of free land from the federal government. Under the act’s provisions, Uncle Sam transferred millions of acres of the public domain to homesteaders like the European and Russian immigrants described in “O Pioneers!” and “My Ántonia,” the two most famous Nebraska novels penned by Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize-winning daughter of a failed Nebraska homesteader-turned-real estate and insurance salesman.

East of the 100th meridian, sufficient rain fell to sustain agriculture and ranching on 160-acre sections. When one moved west, however, precipitation diminished. Even for ranching, 160-acre allotments proved too small. More land was required. Where predecessors had failed, Congressman Moses P. Kinkaid succeeded. He and others familiar with western aridity persuaded members of Congress to think differently, to experiment with homestead claims larger than a quarter-section, 160 acres. Passed by Congress and signed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the act that bears Kinkaid’s name authorized homestead claims as large as 640 acres per entry in the thirty-seven counties of central and western Nebraska, a region known as the sandhills because it encompasses millions of acres of grass-stabilized sand dunes.

As expected, some large cattlemen abused the Kinkaid Act. Did James and Harold Cook? Possible acquaintances did. Bartlett Richards and William G. Comstock, then among Nebraska’s wealthiest ranchers, paid aged veterans, military men’s widows, and willing vagrants to file false entries. They intimidated and threatened legitimate Kinkaiders, as these homesteaders became known. Such abuses were short-lived. With the assistance of “Old Jules” Sandoz, father of Mari, Uncle Sam’s investigators arrested and prosecuted Richards and Comstock. Their imprisonment helped to end the most flagrant abuses of the law by 1907. Kinkaiders hurried into the Sand Hills. By 1910, six years after the law took effect, the region’s population increased by fifty percent, to 162,217.

One later Kinkaider, Harold J. Cook, was neither a newcomer nor a hopeful homesteader in western Nebraska. The eldest son of James H. Cook, the founder and owner of the Agate Springs Ranch, he nonetheless exploited the Kinkaid Act to acquire 640 acres adjacent to lands his father owned and controlled along the Niobrara River. Possible because Harold, then 20, had never made a land claim entry before, the acquisition may have added to neighboring ranchers’ disdain for the Cooks, who maintained stronger ties with family, friends, and acquaintances elsewhere in the country than with their immediate neighbors. Had Congressmen been aware of Harold’s entry—and Kinkaid, a friend of the family, probably was—they might have felt their earlier suspicions confirmed: large cattlemen would abuse the act to enlarge their landholdings.

But Harold’s 1908 entry, made at his father’s request, was filed in the public interest and in the interest of science. By that year, paleontologists around the country had heard of the fossil beds in the hills three miles east of Agate Springs Ranch. After 1904, in fact, universities and museums the likes of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) had unearthed and removed some of the world’s most significant early Miocene Epoch mammal fossils—Menoceras, Dinohyus, Beardog, and Moropus—from the hills where James and his then-fiancée had found bones in 1885. In years between, James and Kate married and purchased her parents’ 160-acre ranch, which they renamed Agate Springs. James next bought out neighboring ranches and the homestead claims family members and friends had or subsequently filed on land in the Niobrara River Valley to the east and west of the ranch.

None of James’ acquisitions had included the bone-bearing fossil hills, however. By this time, they’d already become contested territory, with the Carnegie seeking promises from the Cooks for exclusive access to the bone quarries. Despite the pressure, the Cooks favored and maintained an open-door policy: any qualified excavators could come. For themselves, they sought only acknowledgement of James’ discovery and an opportunity to witness the digs. These conditions proved unacceptable to William J. Holland, the Carnegie Museum’s strong-willed and competitive director.

At the time, scientists and museums around the country (and world) competed fiercely for the best of the best fossils, for the notoriety and fame they’d bring both discoverer and exhibiting institution. Today, more than a century later, the hills’ names reveal this rivalry. Carnegie and University [of Nebraska] Hills even then, by 1908, each bore the name of the respective institution that worked it first. Winning the Cooks’ favor, reasoned Holland and his lead excavator Olaf Peterson, could further guarantee access to and control of the Agate fossil beds.

But they went too far. Not only did they press the Cooks for exclusive access, they claimed in print that Peterson, not James, discovered and recognized the bonebed’s paleontological significance. In response to one letter Holland penned, Harold Cook wrote in the margins “to write a letter of this kind is the work of a pin headed, egotistical, educated fool.”

These circumstances strained the relationship between the Cooks, Holland, and Peterson. The Cooks nonetheless continued to cooperate with Peterson and his Carnegie Museum field crew for at least another year. The tipping point came when Peterson and Holland learned from the Cooks that the bone-bearing fossil hills remained in the public domain. James encouraged the Carnegie men to cooperate with the other institutions working the fossil hills to allow equal access to all. All the Cooks asked for was grazing privileges. Holland refused, however; he wanted sole control of the fossil quarries. To guarantee this, he and Peterson sought formal legal title to the land.

To the benefit of all but Holland and Peterson, they didn’t get it. The Cooks had used the Kinkaid Act to thwart Holland’s maneuvering. Their reasons for Harold filing his 640-acre claim on the land around University and Carnegie Hills certainly hadn’t been anticipated by Moses Kinkaid or other lawmakers. One can only imagine what neighboring ranchers and homesteaders might have thought. If not for the fossils, outsiders certainly could have considered Harold’s claim a land grab by a large rancher. Memories of the Kinkaid Act’s initial abuse by Alliance-area ranchers would have been fresh in peoples’ minds.

Regardless of anyone’s opinion, Harold compiled with and eventually met the Act’s residency and improvement requirements. They were the same as those for the Homestead Act. Harold moved a simple wood cabin to the claim’s northwest corner, where it remains today. There, at East Agate, he and, beginning in 1910, his wife and daughters lived until 1914. After Harold’s family moved to the main ranch three miles west, the cabin was occupied seasonally by paleontologists like Albert Thompson while they were working at the bone hills.

With the end of the 1908 field season, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History ceased excavations and left the Agate fossil beds for the last time. They were replaced by 1911 by Thompson and field crews from the American Museum of Natural History in New York who discovered and recovered seventeen nearly complete chaliocothere, or Moropus, skeletons which solidified the site’s future status as a classic fossil locality worthy of protection and preservation by the National Park Service. Today, because of the Cooks’ use of the Kinkaid Act, people from around the world visit and tour one of the world’s most significant Miocene Epoch fossil sites. It’s a place well worth the time and effort to visit.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger