Video
The Power of Story
Transcript
An item is just a thing unless it has its story. Um, so the analogy I was making is that you could have a really beautiful, wonderful, old chair but it's just a beautiful, wonderful, old chair if you don't have the story that went with it. If you didn't know that this chair actually belonged to say, Marie Antoinette, then it's a whole different thing. It's not just a chair.
I- I'll give you another example. One time when I was visiting my mother at the ranch and she pulled out an envelope from a chest of drawers, just an envelope, and in it was just a bit of lace. Well, if after she had died and I was going through through the house and there was an envelope with a bit of lace, it's just a bit of lace. "What's this?" And who knows if it would even have been kept? It's just, "Why does she have a bit of lace in an envelope?" But what she told me was that this lace was this lace collar and the lace collar belonged to Susan B. Anthony and was a gift from Susan B. Anthony to a member of my family. I immediately said, "But you can't just leave it in an envelope. "We will never know what it is," so she had it - she got photographs of everybody involved, she had it archivally framed and found the- the story that my great-great-grandmother had written about how it came into the family, and a- included all of that in an archival frame. And I have that.
She wanted to make sure I had it, but now people will know what that bit of lace is and it will be because there's a story that goes with it. It belonged to Susan B. Anthony, and so now it's something special and will be kept as opposed to just a bit of lace in an envelope? "Why is that there?"
When Jim Cook first moved there, there was really just blowing sand valley wall to valley wall instead of the wonderful hay meadows and lush grass that you find today, and there wasn't a tree, not even the size of a kn-kn-knitting needle. There were - there were no trees. Uh, the reason it was blowing sand was the days of the buffalo were very very recent and you know they'll hang around the water sources as long as they can and then graze away from it and come back and then graze away from it so that nothing has a chance to grow, and it's only until they have to travel too far to get back to water that they then move on to the next river either to the north or to the south. Uh, Jim Cook, having been born and raised, at least in his early years, in Michigan, really liked trees and he knew the value of trees is windbreaks and help for the cattle for the when it was winter and he just liked them so he-he took horse a team and wagon and traveled south to the Platte River, which is today about an hour's drive on a highway, and pulled up all the little cottonwood seedlings and saplings that he could find, brought them home and planted them. And he did this year after year, uh, keeping them watered because in that dry, harsh climate, if you're not - if they're not individually watered they're not - wouldn't have lived, until he established this wonderful grove of cottonwoods, some of which are - were probably planted in the er- 1890
or late 1880s and are still alive.
The one object that I find of particular interest is a cow hide that always hung on the roof of the porch of the ranch house. It is a painting of Custer's Last Stand by those people who actually participated in it. It tells the entire story of what happened
in-in the Battle of Little Big Horn, of Custer's Last Stand from beginning to end, and since those were the people that were there, they know what happened. It was painted at the request of Jim Cook who had initially asked them to please just tell him the story, so he could write it down. They didn't want to do that. They wanted to paint it, so there are photographs of them painting that picture, and they would sit around it and discuss among themselves what ha-wha- happened and what was the best way to depict it, and then they would paint that section of it and then they would sit and discuss again and paint that section of it and so it is a full picture of it.
Another thing that I find really interesting is a portrait that's painted of Red Cloud and it is the only one that was ever painted of him from life and again the family had been asking him, "We want to get your portrait painted. You're important man. People in the future "are going to need to know what you looked like." And he wasn't interested. This wasn't part of their culture, but they kept asking. One day, when he was visiting, he showed up at the door dressed in his best beaded single feather and an announced that he was ready to have his portrait painted. Didn't occur to him that you have to make a few arrangements ahead of time. You need canvas, paint, and a portrait artist. And he would never come back. That was the one and only chance and they happened by the best of good fortune to have canvas and paints and a portrait artist visiting, so immediately they sat him down and the portrait was portrait was painted. And apparently it was a really good likeness of him, because a few years later, after he had died, an elderly woman who had known him all of her life came into the house, saw it hanging in the on the wall, shrieked, threw her skirts over her head, and scuttled into the hills, and it was hours before anybody was able to persuade her that it was safe to come back. She thought they somehow had hung her friend on their wall. It was - it would be horrifying for her I'm sure.
When I was a smallish child, I didn't actually get to the ranch anywhere near as often as I wanted to. I got there for a couple of weeks when I was seven or eight and again when I was eight, and I think I stayed a month when I was nine, or maybe it was a different time that I stayed, but there only three times and the longest I was ever there was a month, and the other two times were just for two weeks, but while I was there, people would come to see the collections, and I always went with and followed and listened and asked my mother and asked my grandfather about things so that at one point I remember there were a few times when my mother was busy and I knew enough at that time that I did some conducting of visitors myself and told them about things now I didn't know an awful lot about everything, so if they asked a question I didn't know, I had my mother to run in and, you know, and find out, but I do remember on a few occasions conducting visitors, but un- I do remember my mother telling me about them.
I do remember, you know my mother was a - a great storyteller. She would spend her life - she spent her life largely telling us the stories of her childhood and about her family, um, sometimes I thought ad nauseum and my eyes would kind of - not really - roll in my head. [inaudible] You know, I didn't fully appreciate it when I was a child, but I heard them over and over, so many of them stuck, and then my mother wrote this wonderful book called Heart Bags And Handshakes, which is largely the story of the Cook collection and how the collection came to be in the possession and the story - individual stories of many of the objects in there, at least the ones that she thought were more important and more interesting. And what it felt like was wonderful. There's something about the place that runs deep into the soul of myself.
The house was furnished with what people would call today antique furniture. It was the furniture that Jim and Kate Cook had had. It was the furniture that Harold Cook and his wife Eleanor had, and it was just the furniture they had and I- I took that for granted. What was wonderful about the contents of the house was what could be found on what is called the north porch, the vestibule, and the den. The north porch was enclosed, uh, just a few years after the house was built, in 1892, and it has an external door and then a door into what we call the vestibule. The western third to a half, somewhere in there, of the north porch was a separate room, and in that room were big timbers of shelves and on them were the most marvelous assortment of rocks and fossils and interesting objects. Uh, these were things that my grandfather Harold Cook had brought in as things that he particularly liked and that room was called the bone room, and I loved going into the bone room, and I absolutely adored being there with my grandfather who would point out the various things that were there and tell me about them and I- I would listen to him in just absolute rapt attention because he was always so interesting in the way he told things. The rest of the north porch was filled with Native American - mostly Sioux but some Cheyenne - gifts that had been given to the family from early, early years because shortly after Jim Cook went to live there, he contacted his Sioux and Cheyenne friends whom he had had from long before he ever moved to the ranch and invited them to come and visit, which they did. They came every - some of them came at least every summer. Uh, sometimes there would be several groups of them coming would come in wagon loads of a few wagons to 10, 15, 20. One time there were 20 wagon loads that came to visit - to visit. They came with gifts -household - you know hostess gifts I guess you could call them, things that they'd specially made for the individuals who lived there, and as the family grew - my grandfather got married and they had their one, two, three four daughters, they would be gifts for the children and gifts for the adults and every single one of them, including the gifts for their children, were immediately removed from the person - recipient - and put on the wall displayed and valued and taken care of, and if a story had come along with them, that story was preserved and written down, and so this collection of, uh, artifacts which also were in the vestibule and in the room that we called the den at that time. There came to be more and more and more, and the Native Americans, when they came to visit, observed this is what happens when we bring things. They are valued. They are put on display.
If there's - the story is remembered and they're taken care of. These are really appreciated and this turned out to be important as the years passed and more years passed after pe- everybody had been on the reservation for years. Um, it turned out that as the elders an-and I - these are the men and women who had lived portions of their adult life prior to on reservations and who knew how to live without white men around. As these older people started to to die and their offs- their children who had never lived anywhere but on the reservation did what often happens today, uh, when the parent dies. If you don't have room or need for something, you know, you don't keep everything the parent has. You kind of just keep a few things, maybe, and the rest gets - is gone. The result was that very little of any of the- the objects that these people had kept to remind them, their- their- their special objects they had kept from before they were living on reservations, these weren't being kept. They were being gotten rid of or destroyed, or just - they weren't valued as- as they, as the elders would have hoped because you understand that the way of life that they had always had was they knew was gone forever and they knew that the knowledge of how to live that life roaming on the prairies was going to go with them because their young ones couldn't roam on the prairies with them. They couldn't show them. They were confined to reservations and if the objects themselves were gone, it's as if they, somehow the- they- they were gone all together as a people, but they re- recognized that if they brought things to the Cooks, they were valued. They were honored. They were kept. They were preserved, that there was a story. The story was kept, preserved, and honored, and so at this point when this, when it became not just an unfortunate happenstance when one elder died, but this was kind of the standard thing that happened, then they started bringing their special objects they started bringing their heirlooms, and it shifted from just "hostess gifts" just – understanding quotation marks because some of them were absolutely glorious, but it shifted to those things that were of special importance to them. It shifted to those things that were their heirlooms, things that had belonged to their grandfathers or their, maybe their great-grandfathers and things that had particular significance such as the war club that American Horse used in the -the Fetterman Massacre, things that were
really important to them, they brought them and gave them and that is how the collection turned into this wonderful, wonderful representation of not just scalps and war clubs and peace pipes, and, uh, those things but the everyday things - arrow straighteners and the hide scrapers and just the things they used in their everyday life so it was really really representational of the whole of what they did and had. And what they would say when they would bring these gifts is that "Your children's, "you'll remember the stories and your children's children will tell our "children's children the stories. They can come and see them. They will still "exist and your children's children can tell our children's children and they will know the stories." And that was what was done.
The collections became a real attraction possibly more for white people than for Native. Uh, people came all the time and to ask for, uh, tours through the collections. My mother has written and told me that when she was a child it was not that unusual on a weekend for every member of the family to be conducting a separate group of people through the collections and they had to kind of space themselves so that, you know, what- what- what one person was showing and telling would not interfere what what somebody else was showing and telling. So that it was this responsibility of caring for and telling the stories was has always been very much honored by our family.
Description
Gretchen Meade (great-granddaughter of James Cook) shares several of her family's stories at Agate Springs Ranch and what makes a story important.
Duration
19 minutes, 8 seconds
Credit
Nebraska Writing Project
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