CLEMENT YORE PAPERS

Clement Yore was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1875. At the age of twelve, he ran away from home and traveled as far west as Kansas. By age fourteen, he had relocated to western Nebraska. In 1890, at age fifteen, he joined the Texas Rangers in El Paso. Later he worked as a cowpuncher, packer and stage driver. In the early 1890s, Yore prospected for gold in Creede, Colorado. He journeyed to Cripple Creek, Colorado where he stayed for over a year, saving his money to return home.

Yore attended Augusta Military Academy in Virginia. He studied law at Washington University in St. Louis. Yore passed the bar examination and practiced law for a year. In 1896, he abandoned the practice of law to join the Klondike Gold Rush. Yore traveled through Seattle to Alaska and the Yukon Territory where he covered the gold rush as a journalist. He was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. When the war ended, he went to work for Randolph Hearst in San Francisco. Afterward, he moved to Chicago where he worked as the city editor of the Chicago American for seven years. In 1912, he left the newspaper business.

In 1914, Yore compiled a selection of his poems into the book, Songs of the Underworld. In addition to writing mystery and detective stories, he worked as a commercial copywriter. In 1915, he married his second wife, Alberta McAuley Plonke. They visited Estes Park, Colorado for their honeymoon and stayed.

The May 1918 edition of National Magazine states: “Since his sojourn in Colorado, mountains have found place in his soul, his verse teems with the bigness and freshness of the West, and has earned for him the laurels of Colorado’s State Poet. In his poem Colorado is evidenced the versatility of his pen and the lessons the vasts have taught him.”

Clem Yore wrote twenty novels, two books of verse, more than 600 short stories and 300 poems. He died at the age of sixty-one of a heart attack in his home in Estes Park, Colorado on October 24, 1936.