Historical Marker · No. 236
The Badger Hole
Custer County · South Dakota
Erected by Millard Scott and the State Highway Commission, 1958
The bronze says Badger Clark lived alone for about thirty years in a cabin he built with his own hands. That joins two cabins into one. From 1924 to 1937 he lived in a one-room cabin nearby that he neither built nor owned, while he raised the four-room Badger Hole, finished in 1937, the year he was named the state's first poet laureate. He lived in it until his death in 1957. The first cabin, moved and enlarged after he left it, was later rescued by the Badger Clark Memorial Society.
What the plaque says
"The Badger Hole" 1/4 mile Home of Charles Badger Clark (1883-1957), Poet- Laureate, Author, Lecturer and one of South Dakota's best known and beloved citizens. For approximately thirty years Badger lived alone and wrote in the cabin built with his own hands. Thousands of friends, particularly school children, beat a path to "The Badger Hole" to meet and visit with this friendly and understanding man. His poems reflect his love for the West, especially for the majesty and beauty of the Black Hills. "Sun and Saddle Leather" and "Sky Lines and Wood Smoke" are his best- known volumes. "The Cowboy's Prayer," used in many school books and reprinted often in magazines, probably is his most popular poem. "The Cowboy's Lullaby" was set to music and used in motion pictures. He rated "The Job" his best. Our Badger is gone but his works and good deeds live on. Erected 1958 by Millard Scott, his friend, and the State Highway Commission
Where it stands
43.75605, -103.45492 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Needles Highway — 0.6 miFourteen miles that Governor Peter Norbeck laid out on foot and horseback through the granite spires, threading a tunnel eight feet wide.
- State Game Lodge — 3.7 miThe lodge where Calvin Coolidge spent the summer of 1927, fishing for trout, dedicating Mount Rushmore, and deciding not to run again.
- Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 8.5 miFour faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.
- Black Elk Peak — 8.5 miThe highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.