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.

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."