Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.
James H. Cook, the man whose thirty-year friendship with the Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud grew out of their mutual respect for the lands of western Nebraska. Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service.
By paved highway, Nebraska’s largest state park, Fort Robinson, is forty-six miles from Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. To get there, I drive twenty-three miles north through wide open, rolling high plains dotted with Black Angus and an occasional windbreak of dead or dying trees around sky- and plain-dwarfed ranch houses. Off in the distance to the west, sawtooth peaks gray the horizon. Along the way I pass a single roadside marker, a black, tablet-shaped historical plaque posted by the Nebraska State Historical Society to commemorate the wagon road that existed between Forts Robinson and Laramie. In places, erosion has deepened the still-visible 120-year-old and older ruts.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about stories. The place I work has a split personality. On one side, literally, the monument’s visitor center exhibits tell the tale of life, death, and extinction among twenty-million-year-old mammals. On the other, visitors see and learn the story of a collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Oglala Lakota material culture that rivals and, some say, surpasses the Smithsonian’s holdings. Though distinctly different, these exhibits share two common denominators: the land and James H. Cook. Or so, thus far, that’s been the story told.
As I drive north to Harrison, the nearest town, I don’t expect to encounter traffic. It’s late morning. If and when one sees and passes four or five vehicles on this twenty-three-mile stretch of Highway 29, one’s experienced Sioux County’s rush-hour at its worst. The rest of the time, as long as I keep the steering wheel straight, I’m free to observe and reflect.
Today I’m considering the stories visitors hear and how I tell them. The land that unites the stories, the Niobrara River valley, can’t be disputed. The mammals—Menoceras, Moropus, Dinohyus, beardog, and more—lived, died, and went extinct in this region. The Lakota regarded this land, the range of buffalo, as home. So, too, years later, did James H. Cook, the Michigan native who, by way of Texas and New Mexico, settled and, after a long life, died in this valley.
For three months I’ve puzzled over how to tell the fossil story. The superintendent, a historian by training, has challenged park staff to tell that story more. He’s got a point. The park’s name, after all, is Agate Fossil Beds. But the story told most often—and I tell it, too—is about James H. Cook and his relationship with Red Cloud, the Oglala Lakota leader. In the 1860s, Red Cloud led his people and other Plains tribes to a tactical victory against the U.S. military, forcing the closure of the Bozeman Trail and the military posts along it.
Fort Robinson is not one of those forts. Before leaving for the state park, one of the nation’s best-preserved frontier military forts—a place famous (or, depending on one’s point of view, infamous) for Crazy Horse’s murder and the Cheyenne Outbreak as well as Buffalo Soldiers, horsemanship, Wounded Knee, and service as a German prisoner of war camp—I picked up Agate Fossil Beds rack cards and special event fliers to distribute at the fort’s headquarters and two museums. Lil and Anne, my coworkers and local ranchers (as if one full-time job weren’t enough), asked me to report back on the fire by Fort Rob. The what? What fire? The fire north of the park, they said, assuring me Fort Rob would be open.
For days at a time this summer, I’ve lived oblivious to the goings on outside the Niobrara River Valley. I have no television, nor do I frequently read the New York Times I subscribe to. My one daily source of news is Wyoming Public Radio. I listen as I prepare for work in the mornings and make dinner in the evenings. Beyond that, if I don’t see it, I don’t know about it. And since Agate Fossil Beds’ visitor center and housing complex sit on the Niobrara’s flood plain, I see only what’s visible up and down the valley or above the bordering bluffs.
When I leave for Fort Rob, I drive north up and out this valley. By my native East Coast standards, nowhere in the monument does the Niobrara qualify as a river. Even weighted down by my middle-age, donut-sized spare tire, my cycling-strong yet never spring-loaded legs could launch me over this river in a single bound.
Nonetheless, during the last million years, the Niobrara incised a 150- to 200-foot deep valley into the high plains. Once topside, I see columns of gray and black smoke billowing east and widening out like frothy water and spray at the base of a waterfall. One as unfamiliar with the land and scale as I was not long ago would readily guess the fire is just over the horizon, not 30 or more miles distant.
Wildfires on the windy high plains are as unpredictable as stories. One never knows where lightning might strike a fire that blackens land and sky. Whenever it storms, local ranchers drive to the high points and watch. They could sit in parked pickups for hours, like sentries standing guard. My suspicion: they’ve done this for decades—before cell phones, before storm chasing became a profession. Back then, after storms passed, I imagine them meeting somewhere central, the ranch nearest the middle. Over coffee or beer, they would report what they witnessed: where lightning struck, on whose property and pasture. They probably shared news and gossiped.
It’s because of gossip that I’m driving to Fort Rob to explore on my day off. Recently, some have questioned the rarity of James Cook’s relationship with Red Cloud. Cook claimed to meet and befriend the Lakota leader in 1874 or 1875, when he served as an arbiter between the chief and O.C. Marsh, the competitive and self-promoting Yale University paleontologist (one of the field’s founders). Marsh wished to dig up fossils from the White River Badlands in Lakota territory south of the Black Hills; Red Cloud and other tribal leaders refused. They suspected Marsh sought gold, not fossils.
The skepticism seems justified. Cook’s and Red Cloud’s relationship would seem implausible even today—intergenerational and intercultural. When they met, Cook was 17 and Red Cloud, one of the Lakota’s most powerful and feared leaders, 53. In addition, they’d at one time or another been enemies of the Other. During the Apache campaigns in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1880s, Cook served as a scout for the Army. Red Cloud earlier had orchestrated, among other battles, the 1866 massacre of Captain William J. Fetterman at Fort Phil Kearny in present-day Wyoming. Red Cloud sought to protect the buffalo hunting grounds promised his people in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
Despite these ostensible obstacles, Cook’s and Red Cloud’s friendship lasted thirty-four or -five years, until Red Cloud’s passing in 1909. Between 1887, when Cook purchased and renamed his in-laws’ ranch Agate Springs Ranch, and 1908, Red Cloud, his family, and members of his band routinely traveled 150 miles by wagon train from the Pine Ridge Reservation to stay with the Cooks. No one doubts these visits documented in paintings and photographs and in gifts given to Cook by Red Cloud and his followers. The source of the skepticism is as yet unsubstantiated reports—rumors, really—that Red Cloud and his followers also visited other ranchers who lived farther east on the Niobrara River.
A recent discovery (for me, that is) added to percolating doubt about Cook’s claim about mediating between Marsh and Red Cloud: Marsh had hired a white man named Henry C. (Hank) Clifford, who’d married a Lakota woman, to collect fossils for him in Nebraska. Along with William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Clifford had served previously as a guide for Marsh’s 1870 Yale College Expedition through central Nebraska.
In 1874, Clifford joined Marsh at Fort Rob. Marsh “depended for assistance in the field on a number of frontiersmen who had been in his employ as collectors and guides in previous expeditious [sic],” the New York Daily Tribune reported on December 22, 1874, “and on whom he knew he could implicitly rely. Among these [at the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson] was Hank Clifford, who had been his chief guide in the Niobrara expedition of last year [1873], and whose knowledge of the country and of the Indians had been fully tested.”
The next sentence in this article Marsh reputedly penned added to my growing doubt about the accuracy—and truth—of the story we tell Agate’s visitors: “Other less famous but promising aspirants for honors upon the bone-fields were attached to the expedition.” Could Cook have been one of these aspirants, a young man who in later years remembered—or imagined—for himself a more significant role? Hopefully, my next post will provide some answers.
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger