The Lost Pardner
The Heart
Kaitlin Prest
4.5 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2015
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Badger Clark is remembered for shaping the poetry of the Old West with striking impressions of the cowboy life. But his poem “The Lost Pardner” about the intimate love of two cowboys has a special kind of beauty. It points to the often forgotten queerness of frontier life, where there was plenty of space to be alone and plenty of cowboys to be alone with.
Badger Clark wasn’t the only one out there. Queer fur trappers, stagecoach drivers, European explorers, and poets, like Clark, made their way out west looking for the freedom of a new context. And for many of them, that’s what they found.
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| 0:26.0 | It means a lot to us. Happy listening from prx.org's radio topia. |
| 0:33.0 | Short and sweet by the heart. A little history. |
| 0:39.0 | Gay cowboys. |
| 0:41.0 | You are too much for me, yes. Some horse and bitch. |
| 0:49.0 | I wish I knew how to quit you. |
| 0:51.0 | No, not those gay cowboys. Earlier. The Old West. |
| 0:56.0 | Kauman, fur trappers. European fortune seekers. |
| 1:01.0 | If you were a fella who preferred the companionship of other fellas, it was an ideal situation. |
| 1:06.0 | Plenty of space to be alone and plenty of cowboys to be alone with. |
| 1:11.0 | Archivist William Benhamon called it an Eden of Only Adams. |
| 1:18.0 | Effectively, going out west offered queers and trans folk a context outside of mainstream society. |
| 1:24.0 | And there were a lot of people who were looking for that new context. |
| 1:28.0 | Like Oneide Charlie, a driver for the California stage company, |
| 1:32.0 | rumor two have lost his eye while trying to put a shoe on a horse. |
| 1:36.0 | After he died in 1879, a corner discovered that Charlie wasn't designated male at birth. |
| 1:42.0 | Or William Drummond Stewart, an Irish nobleman who came to the Old West looking for adventure, |
| 1:47.0 | freedom and men. He found everything he was looking for. |
... |
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