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Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of September 2025, and welcome to This Week in the West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art, and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
Picture this: a young cowboy in the Arizona desert, recovering from tuberculosis, spending long hours alone on a remote ranch.
With only the cattle for company, he seeks an outlet for his thoughts and decides to put them down in verse. A poem might give him relations in South Dakota some sense of how he’s doing, so he mails it to his stepmother.
She likes it so much that she passes it on to a magazine. The editors publish it, send the lonely cowboy ten dollars, and change the course of his life.
That’s the beginning of the story for Charles Badger Clark, a Great Westerner who would go on to become South Dakota’s first Poet Laureate. We remember him the week of his passing, September 26, 1957.
Badger Clark’s story begins in Albia, Iowa, where he was born on New Year’s Day, 1883.
His father, Reverend Charles Badger Clark Sr., was a Methodist preacher whose work brought the family to Dakota Territory.
Clark knew he wasn’t fit for preaching like his dad, but he tried college nonetheless, attending Dakota Wesleyan University, the very school his father had helped to establish.
That didn’t last long, so he lit out of the Dakota Territory, seeking adventure and fortune.
In the early 1900s, Clark went to Cuba. He worked on a sugar plantation and spent two weeks in jail as a material witness to a shooting.
Clark returned to the Black Hills, where he found work as a newspaperman in the towns of Deadwood and Lead.
In 1906, Clark was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Doctors told him that the damp chill of the Dakotas was no place for him, so they told him to move to the Southwest.
Clark chose Arizona, settling near Tombstone. For four years, he worked as a cowboy on an isolated ranch, and it was there that his gift for words began to blossom.
Clark often wrote letters back home, sometimes shaping them into poems about the land and life around him. His stepmother saw something in those lines. She sent one, “Ridin’,” to The Pacific Monthly magazine. To Clark’s surprise, they published it in 1907. He even got paid.
Clark later remembered that made something click: “If they’ll pay for such stuff, why here’s the job I’ve been looking for all along—no boss, no regular hours, no responsibility.”
Clark’s poetry wasn’t about the Hollywood or Dime Novel life of cowboys, full of heroes and adventures. He was determined to reflect reality, listening to the language of cowboys, the cadence of their speech, the humor and toughness of their lives.
One of his earliest and best-known works, A Cowboy’s Prayer, written in 1906, revealed a deep humility beneath the rugged exterior of cowboy life. Lines from the poem have since been reproduced on postcards, souvenirs and in countless anthologies.
Another poem, Spanish Is the Loving Tongue, inspired musicians from Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan to later set it to music.
In 1910, with his health restored, Clark returned to the Black Hills to care for his ailing father. By then, he was committed to his new path. He published his first collection, Sun and Saddle Leather, in 1917, followed by Grass Grown Trails and Skylines and Woodsmoke.
His work also appeared in magazines like Colliers, Sunset, and Scribner’s, reaching a national audience hungry for the romance and authenticity of the West. Clark had a gift for evoking the solitude of a rider on the trail and the quiet dignity of dusty, hard work that needed doin’.
In 1924, Clark made Custer State Park his permanent home. He built a cabin there and named it the Badger Hole. For the next three decades, that rustic retreat became the center of his life and work.
Visitors would hike up to see him. He never married, choosing instead a life of independence and solitude that matched the themes of his poetry. Today, the Badger Hole still stands as a memorial, open to visitors each summer.
Recognition came in 1937, when Clark was named South Dakota’s first Poet Laureate. Clark held the title until he died in 1957.
In 1989, Clark was inducted into our Hall of Great Weaterners.
Clark’s legacy is the elevation of cowboy poetry into a genre all its own. He proved that the cowboy was not just a figure of action, but of reflection and spirit.
And with that, we’ve reached the final stanza of this episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler.
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We leave you today with a selection from Badger Clark’s poem, “The Westerner.”
The sunrise plains are a tender haze
And the sunset seas are gray,
But I stand here, where the bright skies blaze
Over me and the big today.
What good to me is a vague “maybe”
Or a mournful “might have been,”
For the sun wheels swift from morn to morn
And the world began when I was born
And the world is mine to win.
Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
