We’re expecting our second great grandchild in the spring, but I am done with proposing names. The name I put forward for great grandson #1 was Badger; suffice it to say, that is not his given name. Except when he’s at our house, he’s still known as The Badger. I couldn’t get the decision-makers to understand I was not suggesting the lad be named for a burrowing mammal, but for a literary man of the plains — Badger Clark, South Dakota’s first poet laureate, the Cowboy Poet — The Badger.
Clark was born the first of January 1883 and grew to young manhood in Dakota Territory. His mother was a suffragist, and his father preached at the funeral of Calamity Jane. The young Badger was an adventurer who joined an outfit attempting to plant a colony in Cuba. He came home after spending a couple of weeks in a Cuban prison.
After developing tuberculosis, Clark took his physician’s advice and moved to Arizona, where he became the caretaker of a horse ranch, recovered physically, absorbed cowboy lore, and commenced writing verse, selling it to magazines. He published his first (and best) collection of poetry, Sun and Saddle Leather, in 1915. In 1924 he settled into a cabin everyone called the Badger Hole in Custer State Park. Badger Clark is today considered a patron saint of the cowboy poetry movement.
In the first book we find “The Cowboy’s Prayer,” a remarkable poem that traveled well, often without attribution.
Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow
I love creation better as it stood
That day you finished it so long ago
And looked upon your work and called it good.
Clark himself made a collection of more than forty postcards that quoted his stanzas with attributions of “Anonymous” or “Author Unknown.” Many poets and fans have said the stanzas should be set to music. I am the one who finally did it, a couple years ago, and I claim it.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
“A Cowboy’s Prayer,” a standard recited at cowboy poetry conclaves and cowboy church services, was known and recited, without attribution, at gatherings in North Dakota at least as early as 1909. That year, too, it was printed in full — mistakenly attributed to a woman in Seattle, Washington! — by the Bismarck Tribune.
By the late 1920s The Badger was well known here and gave readings in Minot, Dickinson, Valley City, Fargo, and Grand Forks. Several of these readings were for teacher conventions. Dean Joseph Kennedy of the University of North Dakota was at one of these meetings. The result was that on 15 December 1927 President Thomas F. Kane introduced The Badger, who was always modest about what he called “his cowboy stuff,” to read his verse at an all-university convocation.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside,
And guide me on the long dim trail ahead
That stretches onward toward the Great Divide.
