Charles Badger Clark, Jr. Biography


	This biography appears on page 1104 in "History of Dakota 
	Territory" by George W. Kingsbury, Vol. V (1915) and was 
	scanned, OCRed and edited by Maurice Krueger, mkrueger@iw.net.

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				CHARLES BADGER CLARK, JR. 

	Badger Clark, otherwise Charles Badger Clark, Jr., was born in 
the Methodist parsonage at Albia, Iowa, on the 1st day of January, 
1883. His parents emigrated to what was shell the raw prairie of Dakota 
when he was three months old, however, and he has always regarded South 
Dakota as his home state. He grew up in Deadwood and there, wandering 
among the canyons of the Black Hills, he developed a love of dim trails 
and a certain impatience regarding starch which have stayed with him 
ever since. At the age of nineteen he went to Cuba seeking adventure 
and, after enjoying the shadowy rivers, green jungles and 
phosphorescent seas of the island for a few months, adventure met him 
in the form of a native policeman, who arrested him as a witness and an 
alleged principal of a shooting affray. Two weeks of prison and six 
months of leisurely legal procedure, which brought him his acquittal, 
kept up his interest in Cuba, but, at the same time, increased his love 
of his own country, to which he returned at the end of two years. He 
had scarcely settled himself in newspaper work in the Black Hills, 
however, when the after effects of a jungle fever compelled him to once 
more seek a southern location and the open. He located on an Arizona 
ranch near the Mexican border, having the ranch and several hundred 
square miles of desert range to himself, which he found so agreeable 
that he remained there for four years, most of the time alone. In one 
of his letters home he sent his mother a few verses written in cowboy 
vernacular, which she submitted to the Pacific Monthly, and their 
immediate acceptance surprised nobody more than their author. As long 
as the Pacific Monthly was published Mr. Clark was a regular 
contributor and his cowboy lyrics soon became well known in the 
territory covered by that magazine. Some of the better known of these 
verses have recently been published under the title of "Sun and Saddle 
Leather" (Richard G. Badger, Boston). Mr. Clark's original inspiration 
has remained with him.