Dodge City: Queen of the Cowtowns
Near Dodge City, Kansas
Stand in Dodge City, Kansas, and you are standing in the most mythologized square mile in the American West. The name carries the weight of a hundred films and television shows and the collected folklore of the frontier. But the actual history is stranger and more specific than the myth.
Dodge City was platted in eighteen seventy-two, just west of Fort Dodge, a military post established in eighteen sixty-five to guard the Santa Fe Trail. The town's first industry was not cattle but buffalo. In the early eighteen seventies, professional hunting outfits swarmed the southern Great Plains in vast numbers, and Dodge City became the hub of a mass commercial slaughter that ranks among the largest in recorded history.
When the buffalo were gone, the town reinvented itself as the endpoint of a new cattle route, the Western Cattle Trail, also called the Great Western Trail. Texas ranchers drove millions of longhorn cattle north through Kansas heat and river crossings to Dodge City's stockyards, where the Santa Fe Railroad loaded them onto cars bound for the packinghouses of the East. This was the era that made Dodge City a legend.
The saloons, the gambling halls, the dance halls, the lawmen and the gunfighters. Names like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday moved through Dodge City in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. The city drew them because it needed them.
Managing thousands of armed cowboys who arrived each summer with money and a powerful thirst required men of a particular temperament. An ordinance made the railroad tracks the dividing line: north of the tracks you checked your guns, south of the tracks nearly anything went. The cattle drives ended in the late eighteen eighties, killed by barbed wire and quarantine laws and a catastrophic blizzard.
The myth did not end. Today Dodge City's meatpacking plants process more beef than the old cattle drives ever imagined.
