Bruce kiskaddon biography
- Bruce Harvey Kiskaddon was born in 1878 in Pennsylvania.
- Born in 1878, he quietly and persistently wrote poems—over 480–until his death in 1950.
- Bruce Kiskaddon (1878–1950) was born in Pennsylvania, but by his early teens had moved to Trinidad, Colorado.
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I live in cowboy country. Cowboy poets are a ‘dime-a-dozen’ here, but none of them comes even close to the wonderful writings of Bruce Kiskaddon. During the early part of the 1900s, a popular theme for television, movies and books was the American cowboy. During the time of this ‘cowboy fantasy’, a real cowboy turned Los Angeles bellhop was busy writing poetry about his experiences on the open range. But his poems were not quite what that popular culture audience was looking for. Instead, Kiskaddon wrote about both the momentous and the mundane aspects of life as a cattle rancher and of the animals they worked with. Unlike the cowboy heroes seen on the ‘silver screen’, his poems were unromantic and tended to demystify the whole cowboy experience.
A Good Cowboy
by Bruce Kiskaddon
Unlike most of those cowboys seen on television or written about in countless volumes of Zane Grey and other well known writings of the time, Kiskaddon actually experienced life on the open range. Few other poets have had these same experiences , the closest be
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On The Back Porch
Margo Metegrano recently invited me to recite and record the Bruce Kiskaddon poem, “The Drifter.” It will be included on cowboypoetry. com’s annual CD honoring the old time classic cowboy poets. I thought I would bring you a little history about Bruce Kiskaddon .
Bruce Harvey Kiskaddon was born in Pennslyvania in 1878. At some time in 1898 he began cowboying in the Picketwire district of Colorado where the Purgatory River runs through southern Colorado. Kiskaddon joined the Army at the start of World War I and served with the cavalry. After his discharge, he worked on the ranches of Australia. When he returned to the United States, he went to work for Tap Duncan the owner of the Diamond Bar Ranch near Mojave, Arizona, a wellknown and successful Texas and Arizona cattle rancher. Bruce worked as a cowboy here for about 10 years while he wrote about the ranch and ranch life and is credited for starting cowboy poetry in the United States. In 1926, he tried to start a new career, traveling to Hollywood to audition for a job as an extra in the movie Ben Hur. After th
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Bruce Kiskaddon
Bruce Kiskaddon (1878–1950) was born in Pennsylvania, but by his early teens had moved to Trinidad, Colorado. As a cowboy on a succession of southwestern ranches, he became especially adept at working with horses. Following a serious injury in 1906, his work began to include city employment, most often as a bellhop. Until 1924 he traveled and worked widely, both indoors and out, including two years as a drover in Australia before the war and two years in Europe with the United States Army as a mule skinner during World War I. He began to write poetry around 1915 and published his first collection of poems, Rhymes of the Ranges, when he moved permanently to the Los Angeles area in 1924. He worked at hotels and wrote for the rest of his life, producing over 450 poems and numerous prose pieces and publishing three more collections of his poetry.
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