MY HARDING COUNTY HOME
(Tex Fletcher)

Not so many years ago I left old Buffalo,
The place that I have always loved the best.
Where the antelope they play, I'm yearning today
For my Harding County home out in the West.

I can see the mustang band grazing by the river Grand.
I see the range where white-faced cattle roam.
And the lights in Buffalo will guide me home, I know,
Guide me to my Harding County home.

As I wander down Broadway, my memory does stray
To the buttes that rise like mountains to the sky.
I can hear a coyote wail as he roams along the trail,
"Come back to your prairie home" is his cry.
Chorus:

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Notes:

"My Harding County Home" is Tex Fletcher's song about the great ranching county in the northwest corner of South Dakota. Tex Fletcher landed in Buffalo, South Dakota, in the hungry thirties and remained to work on local ranches. He began a career as a movie cowboy and entertainer before World War II, based on his experiences in Harding County. During the war Tex was wounded in Italy and wrote this song while convalescing in a hospital there.
Harding County went through the era of huge cattle outfits on the free range, such as the E6, the Turkey Track, the Mill Iron, the CY, and others. When the big outfits began breaking up and cowboys started their own small outfits, it wasn't long till the homesteaders, or "Honyockers," came in droves. The trend was reversed in the early thirties; the farming is about over, and the entire county is mainly taken by family ranches. Some of the ranches go back to the earliest settlers, such as the Catron ranch at the little cow town of Camp Crook.
We got this song about Harding County from Dean Tarter, a young rancher from the Camp Crook area. We met Dean at a dance at Mill Iron, Montana, in June, 1968, and taped him the next day at his ranch home. There were ranch people from thirty miles in all directions at the Mill Iron dance. While Dean Tarter's ranch was in South Dakota, his summer range was just over the line in the Long Pine Hills of Montana. This whole area is unspoiled by tourist junk, and it is, in my estimation, as beautiful a country as you'd find. It is a rolling prairie country broken by numerous coulees and streams and badlands' breaks. The "buttes that rise like mountains to the sky" are another feature of the country. The main river in Harding County is the Grand, which eventually runs to the Missouri River just above Mobridge, South Dakota. The county seat of Harding County is Buffalo.

Source: The Hell-Bound Train (Glenn Ohrlin, 1989)

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Is Tex Fletcher related to Curly?
-Joe Offer-