Cowtown: The Wildest Six Years on the Plains

For six years, from eighteen seventy-two to eighteen seventy-six, Wichita was one of the loudest, most dangerous, and most profitable cattle towns in the American West. The numbers tell the story: in eighteen seventy-two alone, three hundred fifty thousand head of Texas longhorns were sold here, at a value of more than two million dollars. That is an enormous sum at a time when a working cowboy earned thirty dollars a month after months on the trail.

The cattle came up the Chisholm Trail from Texas, thin and footsore and worth next to nothing at the start of the drive, worth everything when they finally reached a railroad connection. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached Wichita in eighteen seventy-two, and overnight the town became the place where that value got converted into cash.

What followed cash was commerce, and what followed commerce, in a cattle town, was vice. Just across the Arkansas River from Wichita proper lay Delano, a district positioned carefully outside the city's legal jurisdiction. Rowdy roughnecks, dance hall saloons, gambling tables, and a complete absence of law enforcement made Delano one of the wildest corners of the frontier West. Cowboys who had ridden months up the trail arrived in Delano with their wages and their appetites, and the district accommodated both with enthusiasm. Brawls and gunfights were frequent. Cattle rustling was common.

Wichita on the eastern side of the river tried to hold itself to a different standard, and in April of eighteen seventy-five hired a young lawman named Wyatt Earp as an assistant city marshal. Earp earned one hundred dollars a month doing a job that mainly involved keeping the cowboys from shooting each other or the townspeople. His reputation as a cool-handed lawman grew during his year in Wichita, before he moved on to Dodge City in eighteen seventy-six. The cattle trade moved on too, pushed further west by advancing settlement. Wichita pivoted to wheat, and then to aircraft. The cowtown era lasted barely half a decade, but it funded everything that came next.