Requiem for a Cowboy Poet

[Disir]

A foray into colonial Cuba in late 1904 nearly cost Badger Clark, an early day cowboy poet, an indeterminate amount of time on that island—but Yankee ingenuity prevailed. After his release from a Cuban jail, but before receiving official permission to leave the island, he absconded on an American steamship and hightailed it back to the United States. From his in-depth exposure to Spanish he brought home a certain familiarity with the language, a skill he’d later find useful.

Charles Badger Clark Jr., a future poet laureate of South Dakota, took his first breath on New Year’s Day 1883 in Albia, Iowa. Friends called him Charlie, though he later went by the old family name Badger to alleviate confusion with his father. Charles Badger Clark Sr. was a Union veteran of the Civil War and a Methodist minister. When Badger was still an infant, his family moved to eastern Dakota Territory, where the Rev. Clark established churches and helped found Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell.

Six months after the family moved to Deadwood in 1898 to serve another church, Badger’s mother, Mary, died of tuberculosis; his older brother, Frederick, had succumbed to the disease four years earlier at age 21. Badger and his father “bached it” until 1901, when the Rev. Clark married schoolteacher Anna Morris, who became Badger’s muse.

As a teen Clark attended Dakota Wesleyan for a year but just didn’t take to college. He wanted adventure—and he got more than he bargained for, along with an education he could not have gotten studying books, in Cuba. In December 1903 D.E. Kerr, a real estate investor and promoter operating out of Chicago and Mitchell, S.D., organized a Cuba-bound colonization effort. The linchpin was a land deal of 9,000 acres in Camagüey Province with plans to develop a ranch. For home sites Kerr had obtained an additional 100 acres in Nuevitas, 45 miles east on a direct railway line.
Requiem for a Cowboy Poet | HistoryNet

I've never heard of this guy. He has a rather interesting history or rather he was alive during an interesting period of history.

 

[TheGreenHornet]

 

[TheGreenHornet]

A Cowboy's Prayer - Poem by Charles Badger Clark(Pictured above)
(Written for Mother)

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.
I know that others find You in the light
That's sifted down through tinted window
panes,
And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.

I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
That You have made my freedom so com-
plete;
That I'm no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
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.

Let me be easy on the man that's down;
Let me be square and generous with all.
I'm careless sometimes, Lord, when I'm in
town,
But never let 'em say I'm mean or small!
Make me as big and open as the plains,
As honest as the hawse between my knees,
Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
Free as the hawk that circles down the
breeze!

Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall and fret;
You know me better than my mother did.
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 upward toward the Great
Divide.



Charles Badger Clark One of my favorite poets. I love Cowboy Poetry

Life on a ranch amid the Dragoon Mountains near Tombstone, Arizona Territory, offered Badger Clark room to ride and a quiet place to write.