Archives West Finding Aid

Benjamin Wesley Davis was born in Kansas on September 4, 1889, one of seven children born to Isaac Newton Davis and his wife. The family lived on a large cattle ranch owned by H.H. Seary of Topeka. He grew up with and loved animals, especially horses. Hunting and fishing were part of his boyhood and continued to be a source of enjoyment and relaxation.

After his third year of high school he interrupted his education to travel with a friend to Colorado. They stopped in Springfield where his friend took a job with a printer and Ben was hired to help repaint, reroof and replaster the court house; in his spare time he learned the printing trade. When he finished the court house work, he went alone to Verdun, Oklahoma where he worked briefly for a printer before moving on to Fort Cobb where he worked on the weekly newspaper. While in Fort Cobb he also learned the fundamentals of baseball from former Carlyle University baseball and football star William Haislip.

He returned to Eskridge, Kansas in the fall of 1908 to finish his last year of high school. While there he also played baseball and football. In the fall of 1909 Ben took the train to Lawrence, Kansas to enroll in the university. A short time later, when he learned he was failing German and zoology, he decided to quit; but a fellow student encouraged him to go to law school saying "If you can make the football team they'll let you stay, and you don't have to know anything in any case." He followed this advice, and for the first year of law school he boarded with a widow, paying his rent by acting as her business manager. When he graduated from law school he had been so severely injured playing football that, in spite of several offers of football or baseball jobs, he felt the practice of law was the only course open to him.

He took the bar exam in 1913 and set up his law practice in American Falls, Idaho, where he also coached a semi-professional baseball team, and occasionally acted as a judge for the rodeo. He later moved his family to Pocatello where he worked closely with C. Ben Ross, and was State Chairman of the Democratic party from 1938 to 1940. In his sixty years as a practicing attorney in southeastern Idaho he has acted as the attorney for the Shoshone-Bannock Indian tribes.