Bacon

salty and greasy and smoky as sin

Do you like Bacon? Or if not bacon, do you appreciate beans? Do you appreciate them so much that you would be moved to write a poem about them? Badger Clark certainly thought a favorite food was worth writing about.

On September 16th, 2025 South Dakota Historical Society Press will release Badger Clark: Poetry Wrangler written by Nancy Bo Flood. This is a book I spent all of last winter illustrating!

Illustration is a funny sort of business because you can work by yourself in a dark room for hours and hours on something that people won’t even see for a year, but it takes up your every waking thought. Then you finish and forget about it, until it is time for it to come out and then there you are, thinking about it all the time all over again! So to exorcise my thoughts, I am going to show you more behind-the-scenes time lapses of the process and share a little bit of my research for the book, which you can see in this handy time lapse!

Before you click play, I would like to thank Dr. William Hansard, Outreach Coordinator and Digital Media Specialist at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, Researcher for Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, and performer for the Cat Wranglers Productions of Dickinson (and my boyfriend) for once again reading one of Badger’s poems. Without his acting chops, I’m afraid this poem would have fallen flat in my voice. So thank you, William, for reading!

If you wanted to learn about Badger’s time in jail (in his very humorous and illustrative own words) you can find that story here.

Bacon

By Badger Clark

  You're salty and greasy and smoky as sin
    But of all grub we love you the best.
  You stuck to us closer than nighest of kin
    And helped us win out in the West,
  You froze with us up on the Laramie trail;
    You sweat with us down at Tucson;
  When Injun was painted and white man was pale
  You nerved us to grip our last chance by the tail
    And load up our Colts and hang on.

  You've sizzled by mountain and mesa and plain
    Over campfires of sagebrush and oak;
  The breezes that blow from the Platte to the main
    Have carried your savory smoke.
  You're friendly to miner or puncher or priest;
    You're as good in December as May;
  You always came in when the fresh meat had ceased
  And the rough course of empire to westward was greased
    By the bacon we fried on the way.

  We've said that you weren't fit for white men to eat
    And your virtues we often forget.
  We've called you by names that I darsn't repeat,
    But we love you and swear by you yet.
  Here's to you, old bacon, fat, lean streak and rin',
    All the westerners join in the toast,
  From mesquite and yucca to sagebrush and pine,
  From Canada down to the Mexican Line,
    From Omaha out to the coast!

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