Saddle Up With Badger Clark, America’s Forgotten Cowboy Poet
South Dakota’s first poet laureate lived much of his life alone in a prim cabin in the heart of Custer State Park. He wore whipcord breeches and polished riding boots, a Windsor tie and an officer’s jacket. He fed the deer flapjacks from his window in the mornings, paid $10 a year in ground rent and denounced consumerism at every turn. “Lord, how I pity a man with a steady job,” he wrote in his diary in 1941.
Born January 1, 1883, Badger Clark built a career writing what many today call “cowboy poetry,” and what many others, then and now, call doggerel. Clark himself seemed resigned to this lowbrow status. “I might as well give up trying to be an intellectual and stick to the naivete of the old cowboy stuff,” he wrote in his diary at the age of 58. Yet Clark’s poetry became so widely recited throughout the American West that he eventually collected over 40 different postcards featuring his most popular poem, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” each of which attributed the poem to “Author unknown” or “Anonymous,” as if the poem belonged to everyone—as if it had been reaped from the soil itself. As Poetry magazine acknowledged in a correction in September 1917, after mistakenly attributing another Clark poem to “Author Unknown”: “It is not everyone who wakes to find himself a folk-poet, and that in less than a generation.”
