Nebraska Authors

Cook, raised in Michigan, went west to Texas in the 1870s and became a cowboy at a time when American cowboys were still learning their trade from the Mexicans, capturing wild cattle in the Llano Estacado in southwest Texas and driving them north to sell at railheads or ranches in Kansas and Colorado. He survived many cattle drives. He served as a scout for the U.S. military in the Apache uprising. He moved north and worked as a market hunter out of Colorado and Wyoming, selling game to the railroads and hotels. He built a business as a hunting guide to wealthy English aristocrats and the American rich.

Even before he settled on fossil rich land in Nebraska, he met and befriended some of America's most distinguished geologists and paleontologists, including Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, and the dueling paleontologists Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh. He acquired the Old 04 Ranch in the Niobrara valley by marriage and expanded and built it into the Agate Springs Ranch. He welcomed paleontologists to excavate the unique fossils on the ranch, and his son Harold J. Cook became a distinguished paleontologist.

James H. Cook's memoir Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, 1923, is especially interesting because it recounts his 35 year friendship with the Oglala Lakota Sioux chief Red Cloud. He probably knew Red Cloud better than any other white man. Red Cloud and his band visited Cook on the Agate Springs Ranch on many occasions and for a time the Sioux tried mightily, without success, to have Cook appointed as their Indian Agent. Cook was also a friend of the Northern Cheyenne.

In 1965 the National Park Service acquired land from the Cook family for Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Thomas Myers, curator of anthropology for the University of Nebraska State Museum at UNL, was awarded a contract in 1988 to identify, describe and catalog artifacts, photographs and documents from the James H. Cook collection.

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Edgar Beecher Bronson was a Nebraska rancher and author. Nephew of famed abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, Edgar Beecher came west in 1877 to start his own ranch in Sioux County, Nebraska. He was a protégé of famous geologist and businessman Clarence King. From his ranch, he ran cattle on the Niobrara and White rivers from 1877-1882. He witnessed events surrounding the last Lakota Sun Dance and the Cheyenne outbreak. He wrote his well known memoir of ranch life in 1908 from memory. More of a storyteller and adventurer than a historian, he has been reproached for inaccuracies in his memoir. His sometimes extensive use of cowboy dialect has also irritated some readers. Despite defects, his account is regarded as a "cow country classic" and, as one-time Director of the Nebraska State Historical Society W.D. Aeschbacher noted, it helped shape popular understanding of the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

See Anne DeCorey, “Edgar Beecher Bronson, Nebraska's 'Ranchman,'" Nebraska History, 81 (2000): 106-115.

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Known professionally as C.W. Anderson, he was an author and illustrator of children's books. Anderson had an interest in horses and drawing. When he wasn't out riding horses, he was drawing them, taking great interest in their bone structure and conformation. Anderson started his career by illustrating for other authors, but eventually began developing texts to accompany his realistic and lively black and white drawings. He is best known for his Billy and Blaze book series. The adventures of Billy and Blaze revolve around proper care of the horse, while teaching a lesson. Anderson would go to great lengths to give accurate information. He would even go on to write Heads Up, Heels Down as a training tool for young horse lovers. All of the stories Anderson wrote would be based on true stories or people that he knew; only the plots were fictitious. By the end of Anderson's life, he had written and illustrated over thirty-five horse books, and had also created covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

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