The Lost Pardner by Charles Badger Clark ( grades 4-6)

Badger Clark was an American cowboy and poet, as well as the first laureate of South Dakota for poetry. The Lost Pardner is only one of the many poems that came from of the Old West's primarily queer and BIPOC inhabitants, The Lost Pardner encapsulates the atmosphere on the American Frontier-- one in which marginalized people risked life and limb to live and love freely. Throughout the 19th and 20th Century, puritanical influences on popular culture have tried to erase the existance and impact that queer people have had on the formation of cornerstones of western culture, but surviving art such as this poem exist to prove otherwise. Clark memorializes his relationship and grief in this eulogy to one of his lovers who perished while working in deadly conditions, a lucky one out of the thousand nameless LGBTQ2S+ and BIPOC people who met a similar fate.