In visiting with Walking Eagle, today, she mentioned that Margaret MacArthur does a grand job of "Glory Trail" aka "High Chin Bob." I found the following about it, which explains my dad's confusion about "Tying the Knot. etc." and a Badger Clark poem being listed as "anon" when it came out as a trad. song:

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THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG (Glory Trail/High Chin Bob)

John Lomax, a reknown folklorist and collector of Western songs, was at a ranch in New Mexico when he heard a cowboy sing, "High Chin Bob". The cowboy didn't know where the words had come from, but Lomax quickly wrote them down in his journal. Later, Lomax published the song with the notation that the author was "Unknown" and that it was indigenous verse from the open range.

When Badger Clark found out that his poem had been published, not only without his permission but also with "Unknown Author" on it, he wryly said: "Very, very true."

The introduction to the most recent edition of Sun and Saddle Leather relates Badger Clark's own version of how the song came into being: "It began when I was with an outfit of ten men driving seven hundred cattle to the shipping point after the roundup. I was acting as cook because the regular incumbent had gone to town and stayed there. One night while washing my pots and kettles, I heard the boys around the fire discussing a cow-puncher over in the mountains who, the week before, had roped a bobcat and 'drug' it to death. The boys spent some time swapping expert opinions on the incident, so it stuck in my mind, incubated and eventually hatched out as The Glory Trail.

"Nobody said anything about the poem, good or bad, as I remember, and I reckoned it had fallen rather flat.

"Several years later a friend sent me a copy of Poetry Magazine which featured High Chin Bob. I found a real native folksong which the cowboys were accustomed to carol in their long rides over the romantic wildernesses of the Southwest. What was my amazement, in examining this literary curiosity, to find that it was my Glory Trail, with slight alterations. I own that the 'folksong' version is in some points more striking and easy than my more labored original, and I believe it is better known."