Growing up, Jerry Thompson knew only that his grandfather was a
gritty, ""mixed-blood"" Cherokee cowboy named Joe Lynch Davis. That
was all anyone cared to say about the man. But after Thompson's
mother died, the award-winning historian discovered a shoebox full
of letters that held the key to a long-lost family history of
passion, violence, and despair. Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, the
result of Thompson's sleuthing into his family's past, uncovers the
lawless life and times of a man at the center of systematic cattle
rustling, feuding, gun battles, a bloody range war, bank robberies,
and train heists in early 1900s Indian Territory and Oklahoma.
Through painstaking detective work into archival sources, newspaper
accounts, and court proceedings, and via numerous interviews,
Thompson pieces together not only the story of his grandfather -
and a long-forgotten gang of outlaws to rival the infamous Younger
brothers - but also the dark path of a Cherokee diaspora from
Georgia to Indian Territory. Davis, born in 1891, grew up on a
family ranch on the Canadian River, outside the small community of
Porum in the Cherokee Nation. The range was being fenced, and for
the Davis family and others, cattle rustling was part of a way of
life - a habit that ultimately spilled over into violence and
murder. The story ""goes way back to the wild & wooly cattle
days of the west,"" an aunt wrote to Thompson's mother, ""when
there was cattle rustling, bank robberies & feuding."" One of
these feuds - that Joe Davis was ""raised right into"" - was the
decade-long Porum Range War, which culminated in the murder of
Davis's uncle in 1907. In fleshing out the details of the range war
and his grandfather's life, Thompson brings to light the brutality
and far-reaching consequences of an obscure chapter in the history
of the American West.
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