Born: Saturday, April 26th, 1845
Died: Thursday, September 19th, 1912
Birthplace: Schuyler County, Illinois
Religion: Congregational
Education: Willamette University (1865-1867)
Career: Clerk, U.S. District Court (1869-1871)
Territorial Legislature (1878-1887)
Prosecuting Attorney (1880-1882)
Goldendale City Attorney (1880-1886)
Washington Constitutional Convention (1889)
Served: Monday, November 11th, 1889 to Thursday, September 19th, 1912
Chief Justice: Monday, January 9th, 1893 to Monday, January 14th, 1895;
Friday, June 1st, 1900 to Monday, January 14th, 1901;
Monday, January 9th, 1911 to Thursday, September 19th, 1912
Political Party: Republican
Ralph Oregon Dunbar was born in Schuyler County, east-central Illinois, near the confluence of the Illinois and LaMoine rivers. His father, Rice Dunbar – of Scottish ancestry, born in Ohio-was a carpenter and builder. His mother, Jane Miller Brisbin, was a Pennsylvania native of Dutch background. Ralph was the ninth of twelve children.In 1846 Rice Dunbar moved the family in an ox-drawn covered wagon across the plains to the Oregon Territory. He served as captain of the wagon company that included members of the Donner party, who took a cutoff to California and met with tragic events at what was subsequently named Donner Pass. Dunbar led the group through the Klamath country and turned north, arriving in the Waldo Hills, near Salem, Oregon, on New Year’s Day, 1847. During the trek west Indians stole much of their livestock and the company abandoned many of their wagons for lack of draft animals. The Dunbar family, like others in the company, arrived lacking many of the necessities for their new life in the West. Jane Dunbar rode the one remaining horse, carrying the one-year old Ralph in her arms. Celebrating their arrival, Jane and Rice added “Oregon” to their son’s name.
Initially, the Oregon country’s opportunities evaded the Dunbars, as noted in the following account:
When they arrived in Salem they were without money and provisions, and they lived that first winter almost entirely upon boiled peas … Added to this were many hardships and privations … The sacrifices they made and the hardships they endured were the means of opening up this region to the latter civilization, and to them is due the debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
Rice Dunbar worked as a carpenter and builder of saw and grist mills until hard times drove him to the California gold fields in 1849, leaving his family behind. Dunbar returned to the homestead empty handed and threw himself into developing his land. The future jurist’s mother, a devout Methodist, died in 1858 at the age of forty-nine. In 1863 his father moved to nearby Salem, where he died in 1871 at the age of sixty-nine.
Ralph Dunbar attended Willamette University in Salem, where he taught for two years while pursuing his studies. In 1867 he moved to Olympia to study law under the supervision of Judge Elwood Evans. Two years later the Washington Territorial Supreme Court admitted Dunbar to practice. He had a 170-acre parcel of land in Olympia where he raised cattle and bred horses.
Chief Justice of the Territorial Court Orange Jacobs appointed Dunbar clerk of the United States District Court in 1869, where he served until 1871. He then moved to Yakima to practice law, remaining there until 1875 when he established an office in The Dalles, Oregon. Soon, however, he moved to Goldendale, Washington, where he formed a prosperous partnership with future Supreme Court Judge James B. Reavis and had a 280-acre wheat and horse ranch.
Dunbar, like his father, became active in Republican politics, and in 1878 was elected to the upper house of the territorial council, while also serving as probate judge for Klickitat County. In 1880 voters elected him prosecuting attorney for Klickitat, Kittitas, Yakima, Clark, and Skamania counties. He entered the lower house of the territorial legislature in 1885 and his fellow Republicans selected him speaker. From 1880 to 1886 Dunbar owned and edited the Goldendale Sentinel, a paper known for its unwavering support of Republican causes. He also served as city attorney for Goldendale for several terms during the l880s.
The future jurist went to the Washington constitutional convention in 1889 in Olympia and became chairman’ of the Committee on Tide and Grant Lands, largely responsible for writing constitutional Article XVI on school lands. Following the convention, like Judges John Hoyt and Theodore Stiles, Dunbar played a leadership role at the party nominating convention that met in Walla Walla to draw up the list of Republican candidates for the fall ballot. This convention determined the course of Dunbar’s future public career.
Dunbar actively sought nomination as Washington’s first congressman. Unfortunately for Dunbar’s aspirations, eastern Washington’s delegates split their support between Dunbar and Mark Fullerton, who would later also sit on the supreme court. Consequently, John L. Wilson won the Republican nomination by three votes over Dunbar and went on to become Washington’s first congressman. One delegate, a Mr. Ettinger, recalled his feelings at the Republican convention, which resulted in Dunbar’s eventual nomination as a supreme court candidate:
I felt a little uncomfortable about not supporting Dunbar [for Congress]. So I went to Fullerton and told him how I felt. I said there was no use getting mad about this thing. It’s politics. I’ll tell you what we ought to do. Let me nominate him as one of the judges of the Supreme Court. He is a lawyer. You go see him. So Fullerton went to tell him. He came back and Dunbar was with him. Dunbar said, “I live down there in the sticks, and I have never tried but one or two probate cases and contests in the land office … I can’t qualify for that place.” I said, “No one is qualified. We’re all pioneers here. We’ll take a chance with you. We know no law, no precedents here, we have only three volumes of reports.”
Dunbar won the October election by nearly 10,000 votes over his closest Democratic rival. He also won four subsequent elections until his death immediately following a successful primary race in September 1912.
Justice Dunbar was the first incumbent to remain continuously on the high bench until his death. He served nearly twenty-three years, wrote 1,248 opinions, and penned eighty-five dissents, beginning a tradition of accountability through the use of dissent.
Dunbar tended to take a moderate-to-conservative posture on those issues that presented the judges with questions about the role of government in the affairs of business and the regulation of property. He expressed the prevailing restraintist stance of the majority. For example, he once wrote in an opinion:
Once it is conceded that this is a rightful subject for legislation … there is no limit to legislative authority and it is not the province of a court to speculate or theorize upon the practicality, practicability of the laws or the good or bad effects which may result from such laws.
According to one of the leaders of the early bar, Preston M. Troy, Dunbar’s greatest attribute was a blend of humility with a respect for the law:
[H]e had the warm-blooded human impulses of a red-blooded man, curiously blended with the calm equipoise of an analytical judicial mind which at once kept him closely in touch with the viewpoint of the average man and in accord with the growth and expansion of his time and, on the one hand, caused him to hold in proper check radicalism and iconoclasm to the end that he was a safe conservator of society. His wealth of common sense was a never-ending resource which, couple[d] with his honesty, his industry, his fearlessness and his love of humanity made him an ideal judge.
Dunbar’s style of decision-making involved considerable study and intuition. He prepared himself well, depending less upon brilliance than hard work. He approached each case with a particular resolve: “The only way to decide a case is to make it your own, dig into it, and then decide it.” According to attorney John P. Harman, the judge
was from all viewpoints probably the most satisfactory man we have had on the supreme bench. He was not prominent in technicalities, but he could dig into a record, find the salient points, determine the real equity and then in a language both plain and convincing, give the reasons for the conclusions reached.
Dunbar married Claire White in 1873. The Dunbars were members of the Congregational Church and had three children, two sons, Fred and John, and a daughter, Ruth. John served a term as Washington’s attorney general.
Selected References
Fred Lockley Conversations with Pioneer Women (1981), pp. 230-234; Washington State Bar Association Proceedings (1913), p. 151; Julian Hawthorne, History of Washington, vol. 1. (1893), p. 557; “Judge Ralph Oregon Dunbar,” in the Beardsley manuscript, Washington State Archives; and Charles Sheldon and Michael Stohr-Gillmore “In the Beginning: The Washington Supreme Court a Century Ago,” University of Puget Sound Law Review, vol. 12 (1989), pp. 247-284.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
