Don King

“That’s the way I am about everything. I like to experiment.”
— Don King

They say that a good writer should never interject himself into his stories. They say a lot of things. When dealing with “legends” of the West, they say when the legend outshines the fact, print the legend. Only sometimes, you don’t have to and this is one of those times. Most of the story that I’m going to tell you came from Don King, in his own words, over a cup of coffee in 2005. The rest came from his friends who knew him best over the course of his life. And now, you’ll know him as well.

Don was the grandson of a cowboy who went up the trail with the herds eight times from Texas in the late 1800’s. Don was born in Douglas, Wyoming, in 1923, and his parents divorced when he was five years old. His father, Arch, was an itinerant cowboy and Don was raised on the road, sometimes spending only a couple of months at one ranch, before moving on to the next. The next few years were spent in Arizona. Sometimes Don would live in the bunkhouse with his dad and sometimes he would