This Week in the West: Cowboy Poet Badger Clark

This Week in the West · Sep 22, 2025 · 4m

🤠This Week in the West

🎙️ Episode 47: Cowboy poet Badger Clark

📢 Episode Summary:

Charles Badger Clark was the first poet laureate of South Dakota and one of the most enduring cowboy poets of the American West. Born in 1883, his life took him from Iowa to Dakota Territory and eventually to the deserts of Arizona, where a battle with tuberculosis set him on the path of writing. His time working on ranches gave him a firsthand understanding of cowboy life, which would become the heart of his poetry.

Clark’s verse captured the rugged independence, loneliness, and beauty of Western life. His…