Davis, John W. 1943- (John Wayne Davis)

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Davis, John W. 1943- (John Wayne Davis)

PERSONAL:

Born September 2, 1943, in Fort Sill, OK; son of Carl O. (in business) and Shirley V. (a postal worker) Davis; married Celia A. Davidson (a pianist), September 28, 1967; children: Christian and Dan. Education: Attended Casper College, 1960-62; University of Wyoming, B.A., 1964, J.D., 1968. Hobbies and other interests: "Hunting pheasants, fly-fishing, collecting American antiques."

ADDRESSES:

Home—Worland, WY. Office—Davis & Harrington, 921 Coburn Ave., Worland, WY 82401. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Lawyer. Admitted to the Wyoming Bar, 1968; Davis & Harrington, Worland, WY, partner; admitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit, 1978; admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, 1980; U.S. Magistrate, 1981-90; admitted to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, 1982. Chairman of the Worland Board of Adjustment and Planning Commission, 1974-78; American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, fellow. Military service: U.S. Army, 1969-73, served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps; became captain.

MEMBER:

Wyoming Environmental Quality Council, secretary, 1976-77; Permanent Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules for the Wyoming Supreme Court, 1996—; Washakie County Bar Association, president, 1990-97; Wyoming State Bar, chairman of the Civil Pattern Jury Instructions Committee, 1995-03.

WRITINGS:

Worland before Worland, Northern Wyoming Daily News (Worland, WY), 1987.

Sadie & Charlie, Washakie (Worland, WY), 1989.

A Vast Amount of Trouble: A History of the Spring Creek Raid, University Press of Colorado (Niwot, CO), 1993.

Goodbye, Judge Lynch: The End of a Lawless Era in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2005.

Contributor to the Northern Wyoming Daily News. Senior editor of Land and Water Law Review, 1967-68.

SIDELIGHTS:

John W. Davis told CA: "About 1985 when I was in my early 40s, I took a creative writing course through a local community college. It reminded me that I had some writing talent—one of my short stories from the course was published! I had some notion of my ability to write earlier, aside from my own belief that I could write well. I received an unusually high score in the Writing Ability section of the Law School Aptitude Test, which I took at age twenty-two, just before entering the University of Wyoming College of Law. I graduated from law school, started practicing law in my home town of Worland, Wyoming, and worked hard to build a good law firm with a solid clientele. I was successful at that; at its peak, the firm of Davis, Donnell, Worrall, & Bancroft, P.C. was the largest law firm in the Big Horn Basin (the area where Worland sits) and, I think, the best—it was headed by the two youngest ‘A’ rated attorneys in the Basin. In the course of all that concentration, though, some of my earlier aspirations were forgotten. The creative writing course resurrected one of them, the belief that I could write the great American novel.

"Twenty years after college, however, what I found myself drawn to was local history. When I grew up in Worland, which is a small farming town, I thought the area had no significant history. I learned, though, when looking at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Big Horn Basin, that there was a remarkable history, punctuated by some truly amazing events. Some of the events that happened in the Big Horn Basin were as dramatic, as shocking, as any in the Wild West. I became interested in topics such as life in the Basin before the railroad arrived, the creation of my town, murderous sheep raids, and even more murderous battles between cattlemen. I found when I studied these topics in detail that subjects for writing suggested themselves, and I began thinking about the kind of presentations I could make to show people what I had learned.

"The underlying motivation behind all this was that I wanted to write; I wanted to form and mold words, sentences, and paragraphs into stories. (I suppose the motivation behind this odd compulsion was that I had been a voracious reader since the first grade, devouring book after book. By the third grade I'd read all the books in the teenage section of the local library, and by the eighth grade I read at an adult level. So I started writing.

"My first effort was an essay about life around Worland, Wyoming, before the railroad arrived in 1906. I had become fascinated by the lives of people in this remote area when goods could only be slowly freighted in by horse-drawn wagon, when there were no medical facilities, no local government (including no sheriffs), and no markets for goods. I researched all my questions about the times before the founding of Worland and when I obtained good answers, started writing an essay I called, ‘Worland before Worland.’ This worked out to a 5,000-word piece which I took to the local newspaper. They liked it well enough to publish it in pamphlet form and make it available to the public.

"I found that I could do this work during the winter, when the practice of law slowed in Worland. ‘Worland before Worland’ was published in 1987 and during the winter of 1988-89, I became interested in another topic. My wife and I own an older home in Worland, which has been placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. It is quite an exceptional structure (the home is also one of the buildings featured in the book, Architecture in the Cowboy State), and I became interested in the couple who built this remarkable house. Their names were Sadie and Charlie Worland. Charlie was the son of ‘Dad’ Worland, the founder of the town, and Charlie became rich by finding oil. Sadie was the madam of a local house of prostitution. I was fortunate in that several people who knew the Worlands well were still alive, and I interviewed all of them. There were other resources available, including the gossipy local paper, the Worland Grit. I was able to glean enough information that I could write a short book I titled Sadie & Charlie. Sadie & Charlie is a dual biography about this interesting couple, and in order to tell their stories, I had to also tell the history of the little town in which they were so active. The editor of the Northern Wyoming Daily News (the successor to the Worland Grit) was interested in publishing this work, and he and I formed a little company called Washakie Publishing, which did so. We printed 750 copies, as I recall, and I believe they're all sold now.

"A couple of years later another topic gained my interest. I've explained at some length in the preface to A Vast Amount of Trouble: A History of the Spring Creek Raid how I came to write this book, so I won't repeat that here. I'll just note that I was extraordinarily fortunate to find a mountain of primary historical sources, so much material that I was able to shape my book as if it were a novel. It was a delight to write, and I still count A Vast Amount of Trouble as my best writing. The book is about a 1909 sheep raid, when seven cattlemen hit a sheep camp located on Spring Creek, seven miles south of Ten Sleep, Wyoming. They shot up the place to a fare-thee-well, killing three men, sheep, and sheep dogs. They burned all the sheepmen's wagons and equipment, and two of the men. The significance of the trials that followed this raid was that cowboys were convicted for a sheep raid for the first time in the history of Wyoming and it stopped a brief but ugly tradition of vigilantism.

"Oddly, I found myself then looking back to the antecedent events leading to the Spring Creek Raid. Logically, it would have made more sense to proceed from 1879, when cattle were first driven into the Big Horn Basin, and work forward from there; instead, I started with a 1909 event and have for the past several years worked backward. I decided to put together an overview of the general movement from legal chaos in 1879 to a mature society, a progression that took thirty years. I focused on a sensational 1902 murder case, State v. Gorman, in which one brother killed another, apparently because of the murdering brother's infatuation with his sibling's beautiful wife. This murder case led to a raid on the Big Horn County Jail by a mob, in which two prisoners and a deputy were shot and killed. State v. Gorman was significant as a milepost on the journey to law and order; it showed that the tiny population in the Big Horn Basin had come a ways, but still had a long way to go. This ‘overview’ became the book, Goodbye, Judge Lynch: The End of a Lawless Era in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, and was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

"I'm now continuing this backwards journey, working with the University of Oklahoma Press on a book about the Johnson County War, which occurred in 1892, ten years before the Gorman murder. This infamous affair arose because of conflict between big and little cattlemen over the use of public lands and is one of the storied events of the Old West."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2006, K. Edgerton, review of Goodbye, Judge Lynch: The End of a Lawless Era in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, p. 1465.

Journal of American History, March, 1995, Michael Cassity, review of A Vast Amount of Trouble: A History of the Spring Creek Raid, p. 1781; June, 2006, William D. Carrigan, review of Goodbye, Judge Lynch, p. 232.

Pacific Historical Review, November, 2006, Richard Maxwell Brown, review of Goodbye, Judge Lynch, p. 702.

Roundup Magazine, December, 2006, Doris R. Meredith, review of Goodbye, Judge Lynch, p. 22.

Western Historical Quarterly, spring, 1995, Andrew Wallace, review of A Vast Amount of Trouble.

Wyoming Annals, winter, 1994-95, Gene Gressley, review of A Vast Amount of Trouble, p. 59.