The Fort Hays to Fort Dodge Trail

This marker stands along an old military road that once linked two frontier army posts. The Fort Hays to Fort Dodge Trail was laid out in eighteen sixty-seven and first carried traffic the next year, running roughly ninety miles southwest across the open plains. Its job was supply.

Wagons hauled military goods from Fort Hays down to Fort Dodge, which in turn fed the chain of outposts stretching into Indian Territory. For a few years it was a vital thread in the army's western communication network, crossing empty prairie. When the Santa Fe Railroad reached Dodge City in eighteen seventy-two, the army's need for the trail faded, but hunters, freighters, traders, and settlers kept using it for years.

In places, traces of the old route are said to survive in the grassland.