[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: Professor Marsh and the great Sioux chief Red Cloud greet each other in New Haven in 1880.]
[Illustration: 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.
Cook began at once to make improvements to the ranch. He planted trees by the hundreds and carried water to them faithfully to get them started. As settlers failed to “prove up” their land claims over the years, he added new lands to the ranch and changed the name to Agate Springs Ranch in recognition of the native moss agates and the many springs in the valley. He and Kate raised fine race horses as well as cattle.
The period in which the Cooks took over the ranch was one of transition from the frontier days of migrations and Indian wars to more settled, orderly lives. Ranching and farming became the dominant mode of life in the eastern approaches to the Rockies. Even oil exploration played a part in the development of the land. The transition was a difficult one for many, Indian and settler alike.