The quintessential cowboy poet, Bruce Kiskaddon, was born in 1878 in Pennsylvania, but began his cowboy life in 1898 in the Picket Wire district of Colorado. He is widely acknowledged to be the cowboy poet laureate, and his poetry appeared widely in calendars and publications during his life. There has been renewed interest in his work since the mid-1980s, with the birth of the Cowboy Poetry Renaissance.

In his own words, Bruce Kiskaddon started riding in Colorado, and “since that time, I have put in ten or twelve years around horse and cow outfits.” He often amused his fellow cowboys by writing parodies of songs and putting into rhyme the happenings around the ranch and on the trail.

Kiskaddon joined the Army and served in World War I. Following the war, he remained overseas, spending some time in Australia as a “jackaroo” on ranches there. When he returned to the U.S., he went to work for Tap Duncan, a well-known and successful cattle rancher. He continued to amuse his fellow cowboys with his amusing rewriting of popular songs, and in 1922, his employer encouraged him to try writing “Western verse”, “just what really happens”. With his encouragement, Kiskaddon began writing poetry, and it proved popular not only among the cowboys, but with a more general audience.

His poems were published on calendars from the Los Angeles Union Stock Yards for years, and his stories in the Western Livestock Journal. He published his first book of poetry in 1924, and subsequent books in 1928, 1935 and 1947. Many of them have been republished since 1989 in several volumes of poetry, and in a book, Shorty’s Yarns.

In 1926, Kiskaddon left his cowboy life for the allure of the silver screen. He and several friends traveled to Hollywood to audition for a job as an extra, driving chariots in the movie Ben Hur. He remained in Hollywood the rest of his life, occasionally working as an extra or taking bit parts, but mainly supporting himself as a bellhop in Hollywood hotels. He continued to write, though, publishing his poetry and reminisces of life on the range in Western Livestock Journal, and in collections of poetry.

Kiskaddon died in 1950, before seeing the revival of cowboy poetry as a folk art, but his books and his legacy of hundreds of cowboy poems lives on.