The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.65-66

By the winter of 1894 Captain Cooke’s peculations caught up with him and he was terminated in the spring along with Chief Clerk Garrett, and Irvin Cooke, the Captain’s son and fellow prospector on the reservation. Captain Cooke requested a short reprieve to clear his son’s name, and fired the half-breed assistant clerk, Richard Sanderville, and appointed his son as his replacement. Captain Cooke spent the rest of his term of office expelling squaw men and half-breeds from the reservation, and he claimed that several “drives” were underway to force trespassing cattle of white stockmen off the reservation, but did not succeed, and he did not levy any of the required penalties of the Interior Department. The last months of his tenure were spent defending himself against charges by the squaw men of arbitrary behavior, corruption, and illegal prospecting.

The angry squaw men struck back at Captain Cooke and sent letters to both the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of the Interior revealing Cooke’s conspiracy with E.C. Garrett and the agency trader Joe Kipp in prospecting on the reservation, and advised the Indian Office that Cooke had returned his son, Irvin, to the agency payroll. In January Agent Cooke ordered  three half breeds, and J.W. Schultz, squaw man, writer of Blackfoot tales, and illegal prospector on the Blackfeet Reservation to be expelled for making trouble among the Indians.

Captain Cooke and Joe Kipp had been warned of the discovery of their illegal mineral claims, but their defense was that the claims were not on the reservation, but filed in adjoining Flathead County. Joe Kipp swore to his Affidavit before a Notary Public from Teton County by the name of E.C. Garrett, and Cooke’s defense was to attack the character of his critics who he said were mainly lazy squaw men or applicants for his position as agent. When he learned one of his critics was Henry Kennerly, a rival of Kipp’s as licensed agency trader, he called him to account, “I summoned Kennerly to appear at my office, with a view of giving him an opportunity to explain his connection with the subject in discussion, but instead of appearing, he left the reservation and is still in hiding. I think I may ask here, if such a man is fit to hold so important a position as that of Indian Trader.”
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.65-66