SOURCE: “Cowboy Poetry Then and Now: An Overview,” in Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry, edited by David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher, University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 1‐18.

In the following excerpt, Stanley offers a review of the development of cowboy poetry, beginning in the years following the Civil War and continuing through the early twentieth century.

When Charles Badger Clark, an Iowan‐South Dakotan living temporarily in southern Arizona, invented “The Legend of Boastful Bill” in 1907, he managed to synthesize half a dozen traditional themes that had long animated the home‐grown poetry of those who spent their working lives with cattle and horses in the American West. The great American heritage of braggadocio, so beloved of Mark Twain and the humorists of the Old Southwest in the nineteenth century, was combined here with cowboy socializing, tall‐tale telling, the ghost story, and the stubborn refusal of nature and...