DUANE
Duane's take
The way this marker tells it, here's the story of Will Rogers as it happened right here in Lipscomb County, Texas. Now, everybody's heard the name Will Rogers. One of America's best loved humorists, they called him — a man whose stage act, gently mockin' man's foibles, made the whole country lean back and grin.
And the rope tricks at the center of that act? Learned right here. Keep that in mind.
Rogers was born in Oklahoma, and by 1898 he was already causin' the kind of trouble that gets a young man into a certain kind of reckoning. Threatened with discipline for pranks, he left school. Just up and left.
And the direction he pointed himself was Texas. He landed on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins, and he became a cowboy. Out there on that ranch he made a lifelong friend — young Frank Ewing, son of his employer.
The kind of friendship that sticks to a man. And it was in that stretch of Texas life that he picked up the rope tricks that would one day light up stages and make audiences forget their troubles. By 1902 he'd joined a wild west show.
By 1918, he was famous. The whole arc of it — from a boy runnin' from school discipline to a man the whole country knew — seems almost too clean to believe. But there it is.
And then 1935. Rogers died in a crash during a globe-circling pioneer flight with aviator Wiley Post. Of all the ways a man who learned his craft on a Texas ranch could leave this world — it was somewhere up in the sky, moving at the edge of what was possible.
The rope tricks started here. The rest of the world got the show.
What the marker says
One of America's best loved humorists, whose stage act, gently mocking man's foibles, was highlighted by rope tricks learned here in his youth. Born in Oklahoma. In 1898, threatened with discipline for pranks, he left school and came to Texas. He became a cowboy on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins and made a lifelong friend of young Frank Ewing, son of his employer. In 1902 he joined a wild west show; was famous by 1918. Rogers died in a crash during a globe-circling pioneer flight with aviator Wiley Post, 1935. (1967)