Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

James H. Cook met Red Cloud in 1874, when he came up from Texas with a cattle herd and stopped at the Red Cloud Agency. In 1887 he bought his father-in-law's ranch on the Niobrara and named it Agate Springs, and from the late 1880s until 1908 Red Cloud and other Oglala Lakota and Cheyenne made the wagon trip of about 150 miles from Pine Ridge to visit. They told stories, danced, tanned and painted the hides of cattle the Cooks supplied, and exchanged gifts. The friendship lasted thirty-five years.

At Red Cloud's request, Cook kept the gifts and displayed them in the ranch house, and his wish to protect them helped lead to the national monument. More than five hundred pieces of the Cook collection are at the visitor center, the most important in a light- and climate-controlled room: Red Cloud's shirt, pipe bags from three generations of his family, one of Crazy Horse's whetstones, buckskin suits made for the Cook boys, and a painted hide of the fight at the Greasy Grass.

The hills behind the ranch held the other reason people came. Erwin Barbour of the University of Nebraska examined the bone beds in 1892, and from 1904 the Carnegie Museum and then other institutions dug quarries packed with animals about 20 million years old: the small rhinoceros Menoceras above all, the clawed Moropus, and the corkscrew burrows of land beavers called Daemonelix. The Fossil Hills Trail, 2.8 miles, passes the dig sites. The monument was authorized in 1965, and there is no entrance fee.