Long Branch Saloon: Dodge City's Most Famous Watering Hole

The Long Branch Saloon opened on Front Street in Dodge City, Kansas in eighteen seventy-four, the year the cattle drives from Texas began flooding the town with cowboys, gamblers, and buffalo hunters. It was one of more than a dozen saloons on the strip, but it became the best known because of who drank there. Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday all passed through Dodge during its cattle-town years from eighteen seventy-five to eighteen eighty-five, and the Long Branch was the center of that world.

Gunfights were common enough that the city marshal enforced a no-guns policy north of the railroad tracks, which Front Street straddled. The original Long Branch burned down in eighteen eighty-five. The version tourists visit today at the Boot Hill Museum on Front Street is a reconstruction, built to recall the saloon as it stood when Dodge City was briefly the most dangerous town on the American frontier.