Doc Shores - an authorized reprint of Memoirs of a Lawman

Doc Shores is the life of Cyrus Wells Shores, a Colorado sheriff, as built from his own memoirs. Wilson Rockwell took those personal writings, added research of his own, and set the whole thing in the years when the West was still young. This edition is an authorized reprint of Memoirs of a Lawman, the book Rockwell edited in 1962.

Much of it is firsthand. The description promises accounts of outlaw hunting and observations about famous men Shores knew, some on the right side of the law and some not. There are also tales from the road to the frontier: a trip west on a steamer up the Missouri River to Fort Benton, cattle drives from Texas to Oklahoma, and years as a bullwhacker, freighting all over the country's new frontier.

That mix is what makes it worth a look. You get the lawman's career, but you also get the plain daily work of getting across the plains and mountains before there were easy roads. At 380 pages in our catalogue record, it has room for the detail a short biography has to skip.

This book suits readers of Western Colorado lawman history, anyone curious about Gunnison County in its rough early years, and people who like their frontier history told by someone who lived it. Genealogists with ancestors who freighted or drove cattle will pick up useful scenes of that work. Libraries with Colorado shelves will want it as a reprint of a 1962 title. It is a long book, but the tales come in manageable pieces.

Wilson Rockwell edited the original Memoirs of a Lawman, and here he reconstructs Shores' life from the lawman's own words plus added research. Rockwell was a Colorado state senator and wrote several Western Slope histories. The memoirs themselves belong to Cyrus Wells Shores, who is the subject of this book. For more on the editor and his other books with us, see Rockwell's author page.

More about Wilson Rockwell →

Cyrus Wells Shores lived from 1844 to 1934 and was born near Detroit, Michigan. Bookshare's summary of the memoir says he went to Montana as a young man, worked on the railroad in Wyoming, and drove cattle up from Texas. After time in Kansas he settled in Gunnison, where he served as county sheriff and captured Alfred Packer, known as the Colorado Cannibal.

His law work did not stop at the county line. The same summary says he was a deputy U.S. Marshal, a railroad detective, and chief of police in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The town he settled in was named for John W. Gunnison, an Army officer who surveyed for a transcontinental railroad in 1853. Gunnison was incorporated on March 1, 1880, and sits at about 7,710 feet in a high Rocky Mountain valley. Rival railroads competed for the town, and the Denver and Rio Grande became its main line for about seventy years, which gives some idea of how fast the place changed during Shores' years there.

Source: Bookshare, Memoirs of a Lawman