Still keeping busy

The past week (from June 20) was unusually busy. I knew there were some big events coming up toward the end of the week and the end of the week seemed to arrive in a hurry, as my work at the law firm kept me hopping.

On Friday morning, I got in my car and headed south to Cheyenne. I went to the Radisson Hotel in Cheyenne where the annual convention of the Western Writers of America was being held. I’ve been a member of that organization since 1993 and I always run into old friends at the conventions.

As I came into the front door of the hotel, I spied Chuck Rankin and Candy Moulton. Chuck is the editor-in-chief of the University of Oklahoma Press and has been my editor for the last three books. Candy is the director of the Western Writers and I’ve known her for almost 25 years; through the years, she written some good reviews of my books. Needless to say, I like both of these people, and had a nice chat with them. In the Afterword to my Tom Horn book, I made a point of paying them both compliments, compliments richly deserved.

When I got into the hotel, I saw Larry Ball in the lobby. Larry wrote a biography of Tom Horn which last year won the Spur award from the Western Writers for the best history of 2015. He and I have become good friends and we enjoyed bringing each other up to date. The reason why Larry and I were in Cheyenne is that the Western Writers wanted to have a panel of people knowledgeable about Tom Horn. We added to our number Chip Carlson of Cheyenne. Chip has written three books about Tom Horn and is an acknowledged expert about Horn. The three of us were introduced as the three most knowledgeable people on the globe about Tom Horn. I think that’s well deserved praise for Larry and Chip, but my knowledge is mostly about one corner of Tom Horn’s life, his trial.

Anyway, for over an hour the three of us gabbed away before a large group of Tom Horn groupies; we were rewarded with a ton of questions after the talk was over. It was fun, because every one of us likes to talk about Tom Horn. And after the presentation, several people came up and wanted to talk more. That included Luther Wilson, who in 1993 was the editor-in-chief of the University Press of Colorado, and he’s the one who made the decision to print my manuscript about the Spring Creek Raid, my first big book.

He said he remembered the book well and was kind enough to say that it was a good book (more unusual than you might think). And then there were other folks, some remembering past conventions in which we’d had a good time together and some wanting to talk about Wyoming Range War. The whole enjoyable scene was like a high school reunion.

But as soon as I could get away, I did. I jumped in my car and headed south to Denver International Airport. It takes a while to work your way to the air terminal and the parking area. I’d never parked at DIA before and found it huge and intimidating. Still, I somehow found a place to tuck my car in, and then did a route step over a strange landscape. Fortunately, it didn’t take me as long as I’d feared, and about 5 p. m., I took a seat next to carousel 15, a big fancy luggage revolving platform. I waited there for about an hour and a quarter, when this tiny woman (who had just flown in from Nashville) approached me. She was rather lean, but was doing well, and she looked wonderful to me. Of course, this woman was my wife of almost 49 years, Celia.

And then we climbed in the car and I brought her home to Worland.

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books.