Biograpy of Jim Cook
COOK, JIM (1861–1940). Jim Cook, cattleman and raconteur, son of Mart
Cook, was born on February 25, 1861, in Washington County, Arkansas. When
the Civil War broke out, Mart enlisted in the Confederate Army and served
as a captain under Gen. Sterling Price. Afterward he moved to Texas, rounded
up cattle, and sought out a market in Kansas. Jim and his brother Al grew
up in the saddle. In 1866 the Cooks were perhaps among the first to drive
cattle north to Honeywell, Kansas. The boys' mother died later that year,
and their father was reportedly killed by Indians in 1867. Jim and Al
went to live with an uncle and cousin who were also ranchers. Until 1876
Jim remained at his uncle's ranch; he was then put in charge of a herd
of 1,000 steers to be trailed north to Kansas and fattened on the grasslands
there. While on the trail, according to his earliest account, some of
Cook's fellow cowboys started calling him Jim Lane and Kid Boss. The nicknames
stuck with him for several years. In the fall of 1876 Cook and a partner
started their own ranch on the South Fork of the Llano River in Kimball
County. Cook remained there until 1880, when he sold his interest.
Both Jim and Al, who sometimes went by the alias of Taylor Williams,
worked for O. J. Wiren, foreman of the Quitaque Ranch. In 1881, when the
Quitaque was sold to Charles Goodnight and Wiren purchased the Two Circle
Bar on the upper Brazos from Jesse Hitson, the Cooks stayed with Wiren.
Indeed, Jim "Lane," who was made wagon boss, was said to have
owned an interest in the Two Circle Bar, although the records show no
such evidence. He reportedly ran his own herd at the ranch and won notoriety
among the cowboys as a "hard man to work for and inconsiderate of
his men." However, he remained with Wiren five years before leaving
"for reasons of my own," as he later stated. At that time Cook
reportedly "put a notice in the Fisher County Call refusing to answer
to Lane any more to anyone."
In 1888 he was hired by the Capitol Freehold Company as foreman for the
XIT Ranch's Escarbada Division. Aggressive and overbearing and often carrying
a pair of six-shooters, Cook was nearly always at odds with cow thieves
from "across the line" and occasionally with his own men. When
he met a visiting young lady from Kansas City at La Plata, he fell in
love with her, and according to several old cowboys, was instrumental
in getting the Escarbada headquarters declared a post office so that letters
from his lady would be delivered directly to him. Eventually they were
married.
When Deaf Smith County was organized on October 3, 1890, Cook was elected
its first sheriff, but he was ousted a year later because of his needless
killing of a cowboy. In later years he boasted that since La Plata had
no cemetery he had to "kill a man to start one." Whether or
not this was true, he was finally acquitted after judicial wrangling and
a change of venue to Amarillo. Possibly to escape the effects of the scandal,
Cook and his wife turned up in South Dakota for a short time and then
homesteaded near Monument, New Mexico. They became the parents of a daughter,
whom Cook managed to raise after his wife died. His brother, Al, eventually
made his home in Las Cruces.
Beginning in the early 1900s, Jim Cook traveled throughout the western
United States and Canada, prospecting and working as a wilderness-park
guide in his attempt to find or re-create the way of life he had known
during the early years of the Cattle Kingdom. In 1912 he published a booklet
entitled The Canadian Northwest as It Is Today, in which he described
his experiences on a pack trip into the Canadian wilds in 1910–11. Cook's
eccentricities increased in the 1920s when he proposed to open a central
detective agency in Austin to recover stolen cattle, an information bureau
to locate choice homesteads, and a home for aged cowboys. As he recounted
his early adventures to enthralled listeners, facts became submerged in
plausible fantasy. He made his later travels in a battered Model T with
his daughter and two granddaughters.
While Cook was living in Albuquerque during the 1930s, T. M. Pearce of
the University of New Mexico conducted a series of interviews with him
for the New Mexico Folklore Society. These formed the basis for the book
Lane of the Llano (1936). In this work Cook related his alleged birth
in Llano County in 1858, his capture by Comanches as a boy, his wanderings
with the tribe and marriage to the chief's daughter White Swan, his role
as a scout in Ranald S. Mackenzie's Palo Duro campaign, his alleged involvement
with John S. Chisum and Billy the Kid (see MCCARTY, HENRY), and the death
of White Swan from a rattlesnake bite, all mixed with convincing descriptions
of the arid land, with its flora and fauna and harsh realities. One contemporary
called the book "a bunch of the worst lies that would make Bill Burns,
Zane Grey, and John Cook green with envy," and J. Evetts Haley admitted
that an accurate biography of Cook could never be written as long as the
man failed to distinguish between truth and fiction. However, for the
remainder of his life, Jim Cook was lionized by college students, faculty,
and others who saw him as a living symbol of the vanished frontier. He
died in January 1940 and was buried in the Oddfellows Cemetery in Goldthwaite. |
|