Finding the Saddle Point

Kim Cannon can trace much of who he is to the head of Wyoming’s Green River, where his grandfather’s dude ranch sat.

“It was a pretty dramatic, beautiful place,” Cannon says. “I tell people how all the really great aesthetics of my life were frontloaded.”

The Utah-born Cannon, now of counsel at Davis & Cannon, spent several summers there. Under the mentorship of the cowboys who worked there, he wrangled horses—at its peak, the ranch boasted 150— and prepared them for guests, who were there to either ride into the mountains or go fly fishing. His grandfather, Stan Decker, was at one point president of the Dude Ranchers’ Association.
“The ranch itself was at about 8,000 feet, overlooking a natural lake, which was about three miles long and three-quarter miles across, and the mountains all the way around the ranch went up to 11,500, 12,000 feet,” Cannon says.

With no swimming pools, tennis courts or other resort luxuries, guests tended to play cards and drink at night. “There was always a cocktail party — there was a lot of conviviality,” Cannon says. “It was a place where you could just spend time.”

He met people from across the U.S. Many came from the East Coast and encouraged Cannon to attend college in the area, which led him to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He graduated cum laude in 1970.

But Cannon hadn’t bid Wyoming farewell. Beginning in 1969, he owned and operated his own horse pack outfit in the Wind River Range, and for five summers, he and a small staff guided groups of five to eight people on horse pack trips. He especially savored his time in the deep glacial valleys of the range’s northwestern end, where the hungry pack horses happily ate the knee-high grass.

“There was an endless variety of interesting streams and lakes and places like that to go to, to camp on,” he says.

Cannon put himself through law school, graduating from the University of Colorado in 1974. He soon went to work for Henry A. Burgess’ firm in Sheridan. Burgess had recently leased a 3,000-acre property adjacent to his 20,000-acre ranch, and on the smaller plot of land stood a house Cannon and his wife rented for $125 a month.

In those days, he’d spend hours in the saddle with Burgess. “We’d go down the road behind a bunch of cows, talking about cases. That was kind of an idyllic way to start practicing law,” Cannon says.

The firm primarily represented big landowners and ranchers across Wyoming, dealing with conflicts over rights to water, minerals, oil, gas and coal, as well as basic property rights issues like easements. “The kinds of things that I got exposed to on the ranch served me well in practice,” he says.

Cannon felt right at home. Representing ranchers means he’s gotten to spend plenty of time out on his clients’ land in the Wyoming wilderness, exactly where he wants to be. After law school, “I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a horse wrangler’s lawyer or a lawyer’s horse wrangler,” Cannon says. “Every January when the wind’s blowing sideways and the only thing separating us from the North Pole is a little bit of barbed wire, I think I made the right decision, and every June, I think maybe I ruined my life by becoming a lawyer.”

Despite his jokes, Cannon says he’s had “a wonderful career” that’s spanned more than 50 years. Based out of his firm’s Sheridan office, he continues to try cases, and he particularly enjoys mentoring younger trial lawyers. He likes to say that juries don’t respond to the smartest lawyer in the room, they respond to the fairest; and that you shouldn’t overreach in the arguments you make, but never underestimate the power of a simple declarative sentence.

Perhaps his best advice, though, is that “it’s important to combine work with things that you really enjoy, and in my case, that’s ranching and horses and outdoors,” Cannon says. “I think that’s always been a very important thing to me, and I’ve been lucky to be able to find that combination, that saddle point between work and play.”