The Lakota Times: Rodeo legend Jake Herman brought laughter and smiles to all

Thursday, February 14, 2019  

By The Lakota Times

Note: This profile on Jake Herman was originally published in The Lakota Times on Thursday, July, 9, 1981.

After you pass Three Mile Creek, but just before you get to Kyle, on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, you’ll come to a black top road, the only one that turns off the main road, and if you follow that black top, it will take you behind Kyle, near “Spud Creek.” Off to your left, you’ll see a solitary, white frame church, sitting in the middle of a big field, it’s a tall steeple pointing majestically at the blue Dakota Skies. This is an old Catholic Church named St. Stevens.

There’s a graveyard in front of that church and carved on one of the markers it says, “Jake Herman, born January 13, 1890 – Died January 20, 1969.

This is the final resting place of one of the best know rodeo clowns in the West. 
A few years before he passed on, while a patient in the Veteran’s administration Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, he told a reporter from the Omaha World Herald, “I’m not ready to cash in my chips yet. I have a daughter named Faith, one named Hope and I’ve got to stick around long enough for another one so I can name her Charity.”

Well, much to his chagrin, he never did have that daughter to name Charity. His other two daughters scattered to the far ends for this country, Faith in Farmington, New Mexico and Hope in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Jake was the last of a dying breed. Brone buster, calf roper, bull rider and dogger, fancy rope spinner and all around cowboy. It didn’t take long for him to discover that his serious attempts at rodeoing brought howls of laughter from the crowds.

At first, Jake didn’t like the idea of people laughing at him; but with his usual good nature, he decided to make the most of it by becoming a serious rodeo clown. He would soon become one of the most famous rodeo clowns on the rodeo circuit.

Jake rode with jack King’s Wild West Show. Later in his career he joined the Rodeo Royal Circus. Clad in his baggy pants, swallow-tailed coat, flat Darby hat, putty nose and grubby, black whiskers, he was a sight to behold.

With a trick mule called “creeping Jenny” a trained dog named “Tag” and a de-fumed skunk called “Stinky” he brought the rodeo fans to their feet all the way from Montana to Nebraska Many a rodeo bull rider owed his hide to that ridiculous figure in the baggy pants.

Born to Antoine Herman, a round-up foreman and Elizabeth Clifford, an Oglala Sioux woman on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Jake said he attended “more boarding schools and government schools than any Sioux alive.”

The last school he attended was Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania became famous because of one of its former students named Jim Thorpe, a man voted athlete of the first 50 years of this century.

According to Jake, “I quit school because I didn’t want to show up Abraham Lincoln.”

Copyright permission The Lakota Times