From Cowboys to Cattle Plants: Dodge City After the Drives
Near Dodge City, Kansas
The ordinance that made Dodge City famous in the cattle years was simple and practical. The railroad tracks running through town were the deadline. North of the tracks was the respectable part of the city, the stores, the churches, the residences.
South of the tracks was the rowdy district where the cowboys spent their wages. Anyone carrying a firearm north of the deadline surrendered their gun to the marshal. It was a crude but workable system for managing a seasonal influx of armed men.
When the cattle drives ended in the middle of the eighteen eighties, the system and the era it governed both became history. Farming replaced ranching as the dominant land use. Wheat and grain moved through Dodge City's rail yards instead of longhorn cattle.
The population stabilized at a more modest level than the boom years had suggested. In the twentieth century, the beef industry returned in a different form. Large meatpacking plants moved into the area, drawing on the region's cattle ranches and feedlots rather than Texas trail drives.
Today Dodge City is the center of one of the largest beef processing regions in the United States. Cargill Meat Solutions and National Beef both operate major facilities in the city. The cowboys are gone.
The cattle are still coming, just by truck rather than trail, and the number processed in a single modern week would have staggered the men who rode the Western Trail.
