On a spring day in 1911, the long-simmering tensions of the Porum range country in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, erupted into sudden gunfire. James Work, a 32-year-old white male deputy sheriff serving with the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office, rode out with fellow deputy J. B. “Bud” Robertson toward the ranch of cattleman Bob Davis, carrying a grand jury indictment that accused Davis of stealing cattle from neighboring ranchers.
Their destination lay near the town of Porum, in a landscape already scarred by years of feud between the powerful rancher Judge Thomas Luther Hester and the Davis and Starr families, a conflict later remembered as the Porum Range War.
The feud that framed Work’s final ride had been building for years. Large herds grazed across the open range, and the dividing lines between one man’s stock and another’s were often more rumor than fence. Hester and the smaller ranchers accused the Davis clan and their allies of rustling—gathering cattle off the open land and quietly shipping them under their own brands. In response, ranchers aligned themselves with the Anti-Horse Thief Association, a quasi-vigilante network determined to protect their stock. By early 1911, barns had been burned, men on both sides had died, and the countryside around Porum was on edge. When Work agreed to serve the indictment on Bob Davis, he was stepping directly into the center of this bitter private war—bringing the authority of the county into a conflict that many locals had come to see as their own to settle.
On Thursday, May 4, 1911, Work and Robertson approached the Davis place near Porum to make the arrest. According to later accounts, the deputies expected to take Davis into custody on the cattle-theft charges, a straightforward duty on paper in a landscape where nothing about the feud was simple. As they neared the property, armed men lay in wait. Sources describe an ambush in which Bob Davis and associates opened fire on the approaching lawmen, turning a routine service of process into a deadly exchange. In the burst of gunshots that followed, Work was struck and fatally wounded. He died there in the range country of Porum Township, Muskogee County, his death one more casualty in a feud that was already littered with them.
News of the killing rippled quickly through Muskogee County and the surrounding ranch country. To many local stockmen, who had already lost cattle and seen violence flare around the Davis clan, the death of a deputy sheriff was a shocking escalation. Contemporary reporting and later local histories describe an atmosphere of unrest and anger, with ranchers and townspeople alike talking openly of revenge and of finally bringing the Davis outfit to justice. The Anti-Horse Thief Association, already hostile to the Davis interests, is described in later histories as putting a price on Bob Davis’s head after the killing, a private bounty that underscored how far beyond ordinary law enforcement the conflict had drifted.
Law, however, did move—at least on paper. Within weeks of the shooting, newspapers and later genealogical summaries recorded that Bob Davis, his kinsman Amon Davis, and associate Leonard McCullough were taken into custody and held in the jail at Muskogee, formally charged with the murder of Jim Work. One report from the period also notes that Davis had earlier forfeited a substantial bond and gone into hiding, suggesting that even before the killing he was regarded as a dangerous and elusive figure by county authorities. In the shadow of the Porum Range War, these arrests were both a legal response and a symbolic act, an assertion that the county would not let the murder of a deputy pass unanswered.
Yet the effort to hold anyone legally accountable for Work’s death faltered as the feud’s code of silence closed in around the case. Later accounts state that the charges against Leonard McCullough and Amon Davis were eventually dropped for lack of witnesses and insufficient evidence—an outcome that speaks to the fear and divided loyalties that gripped the Porum community. Bob Davis himself, despite being named repeatedly in historical retellings as the man who ordered or carried out the killing, was later acquitted. In the end, the official record offered no lasting punishment for the men accused of murdering the deputy, even as local memory continued to link Davis’s name inexorably to the ambush.
As the Porum Range War dragged on, other gunfights and killings followed, and the death of James Work became one episode in a long chain of violence that claimed numerous lives and scarred the community for years. But his killing marked a turning point: a moment when the private feud between rancher factions collided head-on with county authority and exposed just how fragile the rule of law could be on the early-twentieth-century Oklahoma range. The ambush near Porum left behind a fallen deputy, a tangle of dropped charges and acquittals, and a lingering sense that justice had never fully caught up with the men suspected of taking his life.
