Cowboys are the sternest critics of those who would represent the West.
No hypocrisy, no bluff, no pose can evade them.
Yet cowboys have made Badger Clark's songs their own. So readily have
they circulated that often the man who sings the song could not tell
you where it started. Many of the poems have become folk songs of the
West, we may say of America, for they speak of freedom and the open.
Generous has been the praise given _Sun and Saddle Leather_, but
perhaps no criticism has summed up the work so satisfactorily as the
comment of the old cow man who said, "You can break me if there's a
dead poem in the book, I read the hull of it. Who in H---- is this kid
Clark, anyway? I don't know how he knowed, but he _knows_."
That is what proves Badger Clark the real poet. He knows. Beyond his
wonderful presentation of the West is the quality of universal appeal
that makes his work real art. He has tied the West to the universe.
The old cow man is not the only one who has wondered who Badger Clark
was. Charles Wharton Stork speaking of _Sun and Saddle Leather_, said,
"It has splendid flavor and fine artistic handling as well. I should
like to know more of the author, whether he was a cow puncher or merely
got inside his psychology by imagination."
Badger Clark was brought up in the West. As a boy he lived in Deadwood,
South Dakota. The town at that time was trying to live down the
reputation for exuberant indecorum which she had acquired during the
gold rush; but her five churches operating two hours a week could make
little headway against the competition of two dance halls and
twenty-six saloons running twenty-four hours a day.
Perhaps it was these early impressions that make _The Piano at Red's_
in Mr. Clark's later volume _Grass Grown Trails_ so vivid.
Scuffling feet and thud of fists,
Curses hot as fire--
Still the music sang of love,
Longin', lost desire,
Dreams that never could have been
Joys that couldn't stay--
While the man upon the floor
Wiped the blood away.
After Clark had grown up, in the cow country near the Mexican border,
he stumbled unexpectedly into paradise. He was given charge of a small
ranch and the responsibility for a bunch of cattle just large enough to
amuse him, but too small to demand a full day's work once a month. The
sky was persistently blue, the sunlight was richly golden, the folds of
the barren mountains and the wide reaches of the range were full of many
lovely colors, and his nearest neighbor was eight miles away.
The cow men who dropped in for a meal now and then in the course of
their interminable riding appeared to have ridden directly out of books
of adventure, with old-young faces full of sun wrinkles, careless
mouths full of bad grammar, strange oaths and stranger yarns, and
hearts for the most part as open and shadowless as the country they
daily ranged.
In the evenings as Clark placed his boot heels on the porch railing,
smote the strings of his guitar and broke the tense silence of the
warm, dry twilight with song, he often wondered, as his eyes rested
dreamily on the spikey yuccas that stood out sharp and black against
the clear lemon color of the sunset west, why hermit life in the desert
was traditionally a sad, penitential affair.
In a letter to his mother a month or two after settling in Arizona he
found prose too weak to express his utter content and perpetrated his
first verses. She, with natural pride, sent the verses to a magazine,
the old _Pacific Monthly_, and a week or two later the desert dweller
was astonished beyond measure to receive his first editorial check.
The discovery that certain people in the world were willing to pay
money for such rhymes as he could write bent the whole course of his
subsequent life, for good or evil, and the occasional lyric impulse
hardened into a habit which has consumed much of his time and most of
his serious thought since that date. The verses written to his mother
were _Ridin'_, the first poem in his first book, _Sun and Saddle
Leather_, and the greater part of the poems in both _Sun and Saddle
Leather_ and _Grass Grown Trails_ were written in Arizona.
_Sun and Saddle Leather_ and _Grass Grown Trails_ are books of Western
songs, simple and ringing and yet with an ample vision that makes them
unique among poems written in a local vernacular. The spirit of them
is eternal, the spirit of youth in the open, and their background is
"God's Reserves," the vast reach of Western mesa and plain that will
always remain free--"the way that it was when the world was new."
Every poem carries a breath of plains, wind-flavored with a tang of
camp smoke; and, varied as they are in tune and tone, they do not
contain a single note that is labored or unnatural. They are of native
Western stock, as indigenous to the soil as the agile cow ponies whose
hoofs evidently beat the time for their swinging measures; and it is
this quality, as well as their appealing music, that has already given
them such wide popularity, East and West.
That they were born in the saddle and written for love rather than for
publication is a conviction that the reader of them can hardly escape.
From the impish merriment of _From Town_ to the deep but fearless piety
of _The Cowboy's Prayer_, these songs ring true; and are as healthy as
the big, bright country whence they came.
In 1917, about the time our first edition of _Sun and Saddle Leather_
began to run low, we fortunately discovered L. A. Huffman, of Miles
City, Montana, the illustrator who in 1878 began taking photographs
from the saddle with crude cameras he made over to meet his needs.
These same views were the first of the now famous "Huffman Pictures,"
beginning with the Indians and buffaloes round about Ft. Keogh on the
Yellowstone where he was post photographer for General Miles' army
during those stirring territorial days. The Huffman Studio is still one
of the show places of Miles City, and the sales headquarters also for
Montana and adjacent states for both of Mr. Clark's books, _Sun and
Saddle Leather_ and _Grass Grown Trails_. In a recent letter Mr. Huffman
says, "I have just come back from a trip to 'Powder River' and along the
Wyoming-Montana border. It's all too true! Clark saw and wrote it none
too soon in _The Passing of the Trail_."
The trail's a lane, the trail's a lane.
Dead is the branding fire.
The prairies wild are tame and mild
All close-corralled with wire.
The sunburnt demigods who ranged
And laughed and loved so free
Have topped the last divide, or changed
To men like you and me.