John W. Davis

John Davis practiced law in Worland Wyoming from 1973 until 2016, when he retired. He has written A Vast Amount of Trouble, which chronicles the 1909 Spring Creek Raid; Goodbye, Judge Lynch, which looks at the vexing troubles with vigilantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County (2010); and The Trial of Tom Horn (2016). The last two books were each given the Wyoming State Historical Society Award for historical writing for their respective years of publication.

In 1909, Percy Metz, 23 years old and recently elected Big Horn County attorney, helped prosecute five men for their murderous roles in the Spring Creek Raid. The case made his reputation; he became a district judge at 29 and spent a long and successful life in the law.

On April 2, 1909, seven cowmen attacked a sheep camp near Spring Creek in the southern Big Horn Basin. The raiders killed three men, kidnapped two others, killed sheep dogs and dozens of sheep and destroyed thousands of dollars of personal property. It was the deadliest sheep raid in Wyoming history. Unlike many previous incidents after which raiders went unpunished, however, prosecutors this time were successful and five raiders were jailed, marking the end of 15 years or more of violence between cattle- and sheepmen.

In April 1892, a private army of 52 cattle barons, their employees and hired Texas guns invaded Johnson County in northern Wyoming, intending to kill as many as 70 men they suspected of being rustlers or rustler sympathizers. The invaders managed to kill two men before word got out, and they were surrounded by an angry posse. Troops from nearby Fort McKinney intervened. The invaders were escorted back to Cheyenne, where they were charged but never brought to trial. The event ended in ambiguity and political division in the new state of Wyoming.