If that was the reason for the rush, the tactic worked. Shorty’s relatives wouldn’t learn of his disappearance for several years after it happened. Meanwhile, a desultory run of advertisements in nearby papers didn’t turn up any heirs, so his stock and land were auctioned off — and the bidders got the land and stock for about 15 cents on the dollar of its actual value. Meanwhile, the Sheepshooters were getting increasingly bold. In 1903 alone, they killed over 10,000 sheep. Community opinion was starting to turn against them, as it had with the Vigilantes two decades before, and for similar reasons; they were powerful, scary, anonymous, and accountable only to themselves. Plus, they hated sheepmen. It was only natural that suspicion would fall on them for Shorty’s disappearance. In 1905, a witness in a land-fraud trial in Portland claimed Shorty had been murdered and dumped into an old dry well on his property. The well was excavated; it contained no trace of Shorty. Apparently the witness had made up the story just on the off-chance that the murderer had disposed of the body that way, so that he could snag the $1,000 reward. In 1909, a spring flood exposed some bones in a creekbed near Prineville, and on the basis of that evidence Charles Colby, the neighboring cattle rancher who had feuded with Shorty, was arrested. He was released for lack of evidence — although Dorothy Lawson McCall remained personally convinced of his guilt. The bones apparently were not his. By that time, though, Shorty’s relatives had been found. His real name, it turned out, was Leonidas Douris; he was a Greek by birth. He had changed his name to conceal himself from other Greeks, including his relatives, who would put the bite on him for loans and then never pay them back. Shorty was a nice guy — apparently too nice for his own good — and therefore easy to take advantage of. It had become a big enough problem that he literally went on the lam from his friends and family to short-circuit it. Shorty’s brothers came to town to wrap up all his affairs and to collect and distribute what was left of his estate. But still there was no trace of Shorty himself.
OVER THE FOLLOWING years, Shorty Davis became something like an obsession, and remained so for decades afterward. The family that bought his old farmhouse got used to knocks on the door from fresh-faced Shorty hunters wanting to poke around the property. Rumors directed others to a particular rock at the mouth of Sanford Creek. In the early 1950s, a skeleton was unearthed during construction of a new bridge, and the first words on everyone’s lips were, “We found Shorty!” But they hadn’t. It was someone else. Most recently, in March 2008, Shorty’s grand-niece, Anastasia Douris, came to the U.S. to learn more about him. The family back in Greece had heard that he’d been murdered by cowboys, who had taken over his ranch. She found that, far from being a forgotten victim of Old West violence, her relative was Prineville’s municipal mystery — still. So, what really happened to Shorty Davis? It seems unlikely that, if he died of natural causes, no body would have been found. During the years when a $1,000 reward was being offered, people were crawling all over the landscape looking for clues. If he’d drowned in a river, his horse would have been found; if the horse had slipped off a trail and over a cliff, someone would have found the bodies or bones. So it’s most likely someone hid him deliberately, presumably after murdering him. And if that’s the case, unless his murderer was incompetent, we’ll almost certainly never know.
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Background photo of the beach at Whale Cove was made by Bryce Buchanan in 2004. (Via WikiMedia Commons, cc/by/SA)
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