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Little wonder that many early immigrants to the region thought of the vicinity of Dodge [City] as comparable to the Garden of Eden. There was a saying among the pioneers that God, after he created the heavens and the earth, chose to make a garden for Himself and thus He designed Kansas.
—ODIE B. FAULK, Dodge City: The Most Western Town of All
That Dodge City was the gateway to the Great American Desert probably does not seem to be much of a recommendation for it. And not by a long shot was it the most populated, prosperous, or progressive city in middle America. Why, then, did it matter to anyone? Why did major daily newspapers to the east and ones in Denver and as far west as San Francisco and San Diego carry stories about the goings-on there in the 1870s? And why well over a century after its “golden decade” is there still immediate name recognition when one hears “Dodge City”?
The small city in southwest Kansas came to symbolize both the American West and a nation seeking to fulfill its manifest destiny. Pioneer wagon after wagon deepened established trails and created fresh ones as a young generation of Americans sought new homes and opportunities. The search did not go smoothly. What happened in Dodge City was happening all across the western frontier, only more so.
On the first page of his memoir about Dodge City, Robert Wright, one of its earliest and most successful businessmen, writes that his image of the city then was “a picture ever changing, ever restless, with no two days alike in experience. In those days, one lived ten years of life in one calendar year. Indians, drought, buffaloes, bad men, the long horn, and, in fact, so many characteristic features of that time present themselves that I am at a loss where to begin.”
What makes the Dodge City story such an enjoyable one is that it was a reservoir of tall tales, yet many of the facts are equally if not more fascinating. Most of the stories involve the explorers, cowboys, businessmen, gamblers, women from both sides of the tracks, lawmen, and others who came to call it home or who were simply stopping on their way to somewhere else.
By the mid-1870s, Dodge City had become the major “cow town” on the frontier—with all the good and bad that entailed—and was a doorway to the Great American Desert, the huge chunk of the country that was still largely unknown territory to many Americans. This was the plateau that rolled westward from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. To strike west of Kansas City onto this plateau was to enter the vast unknown, where marauding Indians, wild animals, and all kinds of deprivations waited. Tales about such well-known trails as the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Chisholm followed by explorers, settlers, Mormons, prospectors, entrepreneurs, and some simply seeking adventure on the other side of the next hill were both captivating and frightening.
The exploits of Jim Bridger, John C. Frémont, Buffalo Bill, and Kit Carson captured the imaginations of young men who dreamed of joining their ranks. For many of them, the end of the Civil War in 1865 was a catalyst to begin their own adventures. Some found what they were looking for, some were disappointed, and some did not survive the occasionally harsh surroundings and even harsher people.
On the way west was a site known as Cimarron Crossing. This was where many early westbound explorers and settlers forded the Arkansas River and could then head into Colorado or go to Texas or on to New Mexico. It was near here that Dodge City was founded and took root.
Well before the Civil War, what had initially inspired the early explorations of an emerging America was the Louisiana Purchase. The transaction took place in 1803, and there was an immediate desire to explore the 828,000 square miles that President Thomas Jefferson and his administration had just spent fifteen million dollars on. That same year, Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark began their expedition, and many Americans would be enthralled by their reports about a strange and wonderful and intimidating land.
A territory called Kansas was right in the middle of the vast Louisiana Purchase property that stretched from Louisiana itself to portions of Montana and Idaho. There would be other explorers on the heels of Lewis and Clark, including the well-traveled Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who in 1806 crossed the region that would contain Dodge City. He observed “wind [that] had thrown up the sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean’s rolling waves” and cautioned that people on the eastern sides of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers would be smart to “leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country.”
Pike was certainly not the first explorer of European descent. In 1542, the noted Spanish conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led a party of approximately fifty men, thirty of them on horses, east and then north into southwest Kansas. Coronado’s men had taken an Indian captive who claimed that the Spaniards would discover a river as wide as five miles across and from which they could take fish as large as horses. The expedition had come up from the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico via the Texas Panhandle and a strip of Oklahoma to this flat country that they referred to as “plains.” On their way to the valley of the Arkansas River they had encountered a black-brown sea of buffalo, a jaw-dropping sight. To add fish the size of horses to their discoveries was too tempting to resist.
The captive’s claims turned out to be exaggerations, but Coronado and his followers were still impressed by the vast plains east of the Rocky Mountains. They were filled with lush green shortgrass that rarely grew taller than sixteen inches. They also found twisted mesquite trees, shrubs with prickly thorns, sharp-needled cacti, and cottonwood trees along streams and creeks. They soon learned that in the summer hot air followed them up from the south, parching almost everything in its path. The shortgrass turned gold and brown and delectable for the literally millions of buffalo that roamed the plains. Other animals found in abundance were prairie dogs, skunks, badgers, ground squirrels, jackrabbits, coyotes, pronghorn antelopes, and dark-gray wolves, who thrived on all the available prey.
But most of all there were American bison, most often called buffalo. It is estimated that when European explorers like Coronado and those who came after arrived in future Kansas, there were at least five million and perhaps as many as eight million buffalo there. Big and shaggy, they didn’t fear the wolves or other animal predators. They were safe in numbers as long as they remained on the plains and away from the Rocky Mountain foothills, where they would risk encounters with grizzly bears.
A bull buffalo could weigh a ton and be a ferocious fighter, but much of the herd’s protection was thanks to the older cows with a highly developed sense of smell. The biggest danger buffalo posed to Coronado’s contingent was their hooves. The explorer wrote to the king of Spain, Charles V, about the plentiful supply of buffalo meat for his hunters but that their trial-and-error efforts set off stampedes that ran down horses as well as men.
There were as many buffalo in the area that would later host Dodge City as anywhere else in Kansas. Explorers bearing “modern” rifles in the ensuing centuries had a lot more luck killing the lumbering beasts for their meat and hides. In the unlikely event that there wasn’t a herd handy, other game would supply early settlers and others passing through, including ones with feathers: wild turkeys, prairie chickens, grouse, ducks, and geese. There was plenty of water and fertile farming soil. The weather could be a challenge, though, beginning with those hot winds up from Mexico. Kansa was an Indian word meaning “people of the south wind.”
A sign that summer was giving way to autumn was when the leaves on trees along rivers and streams changed from green to gold, orange, and red. While the breezes no longer blew exclusively up from the south, the air and the ground remained dry. In winter, however, there was snow. Sometimes lots of it. It piled up in the mountains to the west and blanketed the plains. A blizzard could last several days, and just like in the 1800s, such storms today can claim the lives of people exposed to them. Finally, spring crept in when moderating winds from the south—ones that can be harsh and unforgiving in July and August—gradually melted the snow, water rushed down from the mountains, and the earth was ready to be tilled.
The original inhabitants, however, were not very interested in farming. Bands of Apache, Kiowa, and other tribes roamed the prairie, feasting on the wild game and buffalo, the latter supplying most of the Indians’ food, clothing, and utensils. (A brutal but efficient harvesting method was practiced when the hunters stampeded a herd toward a cliff and the panicked buffalo plunged to their deaths.) When horses from the Great American Horse Dispersal that had begun in the Southwest in the late 1600s arrived in the plains and multiplied there, the domineering Apache could roam even farther and faster and send successful raiding parties against such enemy tribes as the Wichita, Kansa, Missouri, Oto, and Osage.
But in the first half of the 1700s it was the Apache’s turn to be pushed around. Descending from the central Rocky Mountains, the Comanche proved to be the better horsemen. That and an especially fierce fighting ethos combined to spell doom for the earlier inhabitants when the interlopers reached the Arkansas River. The Apache were swept aside, forced to find less-dangerous surroundings, while the Comanche expanded into Texas and as far southeast as the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, the remaining Apache and the Kiowa found ways to coexist with the Comanche. They might still steal each other’s horses, both out of necessity and to earn status within their tribes, but the land offered enough food and resources for everyone.
Then white men began to show up. Most of them traveled east to west, finding a region of swaying green and brown grass and choking dust that gradually inclined toward the mountains, at its center twenty-five hundred feet above sea level. Zebulon Pike would be followed by another army officer, Major Stephen Long, who echoed his predecessor’s opinion that this eastern portion of the Great American Desert was “uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence.”
Such sentiments certainly didn’t persuade people back east to fill wagons with plows and seed and head to the Arkansas River area to begin farming. But a few entrepreneurs saw the explorations of Pike, Long, and others as opening the territory to traders. One of the very first was William Becknell. He loaded up mules in Missouri and took them to Colorado to trade with Indians for furs. Not finding any willing customers there, he accompanied a group of scouts to New Mexico, specifically to the settlement of Santa Fe. Trading there was brisk, and when he returned to Missouri, Becknell had blazed what would become the Santa Fe Trail.
In 1822, the year after his first sojourn, Becknell was back again, with a group of wagons and workers and more goods to trade. He was soon followed by others. In April 1824, the largest group yet, consisting of eighty-three men in twenty-four wagons, set off from Franklin, Missouri, and three months later reached Santa Fe. Coming and going, they passed near the site of the future Dodge City.
Still, the city could have become nothing more than one of dozens of settlements that found ways to survive near the Santa Fe and other trails. What contributed greatly to this particular settlement’s earning a prominent place on the map of Kansas was the founding of a fort, and there would be not one but two officers named Dodge associated with it.
The Comanche, Apache, and other Indian tribes did not have an inherent hatred of white people. At least, not initially. Encountering them here and there had the benefit for the Indians of trading furs and other animal products with them for trinkets and some clothing and, unfortunately, whiskey, for which the Indians had no immunity. Even just occasional exposure could lead to alcoholism and early death. This was also true of diseases like smallpox and cholera. During the decades of white migration west before the Civil War, the Santa Fe Trail was basically a commercial route for traders, though beginning in 1849, it also served as a stagecoach route. All this exposure to white travelers resulted in thousands of Indians dying from diseases, much more so than in armed conflict.
Many Hollywood movies would have viewers believe that the sight of any white people out on the prairie would whip Indians into a fury. For the most part, however, white people and their equipment were a curiosity to them. One example of the latter was the Conestoga wagon. It was constructed to resemble a longboat and was watertight so that it could “sail” across the vast ocean that was the Great American Desert. These wagons became known as “prairie schooners.” Indians could not imagine riding in such contraptions, but rather than attack them, they watched as they moved on to westward destinations. The friction would increase years later when there were many more white people and more of them were stopping to settle or were killing the buffalo.
When Indians did attack with more frequency and savagery, migrants and miners petitioned the U.S. government for protection. The government did attempt to work out treaties with tribes and compensate them for allowing safe passage. Such treaties rarely lasted long, because they were broken by avaricious white traders and eager settlers, or because the Indians really hadn’t understood what they were giving away and thus continued with their traditional practices of hunting and camping wherever they pleased. When white people got in the way or trespassed (according to the Indians) on sacred ground, or when an exchange of goods went wrong, arrows flew, guns that had often been gotten from traders blazed, and the white intruders had to fight to survive.
As the historian Samuel Carter III described it, “To the marauding Comanches and Cheyennes, still lords of the Plains whatever others thought of them, the wagon trains were like the Spanish galleons to the pirates of the Caribbean. Time and again they raided the caravans, killing and scalping the drivers for good measure. A favorite point of ambush was Cimarron Crossing, twenty miles west of the site of Dodge, where the Conestoga wagons trying to ford the shallow Arkansas made an easy target for the raiders.”
The army sent units west to build forts in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The southern ones became important when the ending of the war with Mexico resulted in a leap of trading along the Santa Fe Trail and the increase in conflicts with Indians due to more whites passing through the territory. A fort, or post, no matter how crudely constructed, offered some shelter from bad weather as well as from Indians in addition to being a place to resupply and rest.
One such post was built in April 1847. Captain Daniel Mann with forty men arrived at the Arkansas River eight miles west of the future Dodge City. There they fashioned logs into four structures within walls that were twenty feet high and sixty feet long. The geographical significance of the outpost was that it was roughly halfway between Leavenworth, the biggest city in Kansas then, and Santa Fe itself.
Mann’s little fort on the prairie lasted only three years. In August 1850, Fort Atkinson was established one mile to the west and also close to the river. In its early days the fort went through a head-spinning series of names—first Fort Sodom, because the buildings were made of sod; then Camp Mackay, after an officer who had died the previous April; then Fort Sumner, because Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Sumner had led the contingent that had constructed it; and finally Fort Atkinson, after another officer who had died. This post also did not last long, sort of a victim of its own success.
In July 1853, the former mountain man and now Indian agent Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick arrived with wagons filled with gifts and a mandate to hammer out a treaty with the Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa to allow safe passage on the Santa Fe Trail in that region. He never needed to reach for the hammer. The Indians were agreeable to not attacking travelers in exchange for the gifts. Unlike many other treaties, the Treaty of Fort Atkinson stuck. The tribes stayed south of the Arkansas River, travelers on the trail went unmolested, and the government could not justify the expense of maintaining Fort Atkinson. By 1854, it was an empty shell.
Kansas was about to undergo a political upheaval that resulted in more fighting among whites than with Indians. The same year that Fort Atkinson was abandoned, the Kansas-Nebraska Act established the region as a territory. Slavery was coming west with a greater influx of settlers and hopeful businessmen; it was the same issue that had resulted in the Compromise of 1850. There was no compromise in Kansas.
Some migrants from southern states brought their slaves along. Those from the Midwest and some eastern states brought along their abolitionist views. Before there was a Civil War there was a civil war in the territory that became known as Bleeding Kansas, as pro- and antislavery settlers (and mercenaries) fought each other. This continued when the real Civil War began in 1861, and some Indians, taking advantage of the army having abandoned their western posts, attacked settlements along the frontier. For much of the war, Kansas was in chaos: the Garden of Eden had turned into hell.
By the end of the war, with the South clearly on its last legs, the U.S. government could once more pay attention to the West. Created was the Department of the Missouri, which stretched from Nebraska to Kansas (it had been admitted to the Union in 1861), Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, and command of it was given to Major General Grenville Dodge.
In his later years, Dodge would view himself as a benevolent friend of the Indians he encountered in Kansas and elsewhere. This ran counter to the prevailing view, one attributed to General Philip Sheridan’s sentiment: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” By the time he reportedly uttered this, most of the Indians in what had once been the Great American Desert were confined to reservations, and of their prominent figures, Red Cloud was long retired as a military leader, Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail had been assassinated, and Sitting Bull had recently been released from imprisonment at Fort Randall in South Dakota and was preparing to go on a stage tour that would include sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
General Dodge was not as benign and paternalistic in the 1860s as he later claimed. He saw safety of travelers as his top priority and he moved quickly to insure it. There were more frequent and larger wagon trains on the trails. Dodge did not want the prairie schooners shot full of burning arrows, so he sent a force under the command of Colonel James Hobart Ford to conduct a winter campaign against the Comanche. It was successful, pushing the tribe and some of its allies into Oklahoma Territory, also referred to as “Indian Territory.”
But in March 1865, the “hostiles” were back, with an estimated two thousand Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache camped south of the Arkansas River. To tackle such a big task, Ford told his commander that he would need a fort as a base of operations. This resulted the following month in construction beginning on a new post on the north bank of the Arkansas River, twenty-two miles east of Cimarron Crossing. It was named Fort Dodge. General Grenville Dodge believed it was named after him, and it may have been, but there was also a Colonel Richard Irving Dodge who would be stationed there and eventually become the fort’s commanding officer.
In 1883, after spending two years as aide-de-camp to General William Tecumseh Sherman, Colonel Dodge published a book titled Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West. Unlike the lurid tales about bloodthirsty Indians, which were quick to find audiences in the eastern United States and in Europe, Dodge’s writings were mostly favorable, and he wrote about his experience: “For many years past I have been the most fortunately situated for such study, having been stationed directly among the wild tribes, whose characteristics have always been of most interest to me.”
By the way, Colonel Ford would not be overlooked. Two years later, in 1867, when a new county was created, it was named Ford County.
Plans for a postwar campaign against the Indians—they were now the intruders—were dashed when the Andrew Johnson administration insisted on negotiating a new treaty, and emissaries were sent west to do so. The Treaty of Little Arkansas River was drawn up and “signed” by the tribes’ leaders. Because the native residents could not read or write English and certainly did not have signatures to affix to these mysterious papers, when an Indian leader or “chief” (a title invented by the white man) agreed to whatever had been read to him, he touched the pen held by an army scribe, who then wrote the Indian’s name on the document. The Little Arkansas treaty gave the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache the right to hunt seasonally but otherwise be confined to reservations. With no fighting to do, in between forays to patrol along the Santa Fe Trail the army soldiers were put to work improving and expanding the fort.
These efforts didn’t do much good. The compound and most everyone living in it were flooded during spring rains. The prairie heat of the summer was unbearable, and the troopers were riddled by a variety of diseases, exacerbated by the poor diet and poorer sanitary conditions. The autumn offered some respite, but the harsh winter with its seemingly incessant blizzards bottled the men up within the wooden walls. No doubt by the spring of 1866, the officers and troopers had to wonder why anyone would want to live in the area—and in any part of Kansas for that matter. They couldn’t wait to be relieved and sent … anywhere.
Still, Fort Dodge endured, providing supplies, horses, livestock, shelter, and some support for campaigns to round up Indians who had left reservations to roam north from Oklahoma to hunt. The campaign in 1867 was led by two Civil War heroes, General Winfield Hancock and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry. Battles were few and far between because as the army forces grew more daunting with their numbers and more advanced in their weapons, the Indians, with the dwindling populations of the tribes, could not put up much of a fight.
Again, what would become Dodge City might well have been nothing more than a frontier settlement supporting the inhabitants of a fort but for three uncontainable forces that intersected there: buffalo, railroads, and longhorn cattle from Texas.
The number of American bison on the Great Plains, including Kansas, indeed was an uncontainable and seemingly inexhaustible force. There were estimates contending that as many as seventy million buffalo blanketed the Plains by the mid-1800s, a substantial leap from Coronado’s day. Men reported riding through a herd for more than one hundred miles. Others claimed that when they arrived at the top of a promontory and looked down, there were grazing buffalo as far as they could see.
Hundreds of men came west and south to kill the buffalo and sell their hides. An excellent place to hunt was in the vicinity of Fort Dodge. Hopefuls opened up simple stores housing supplies for the hunters, joining the crude saloons that were supplying the soldiers with whiskey. Henry Stitler, a teamster, constructed a sod house, and a hunter, Charlie Myers, built a trading post right next door to the fort.
As more buffalo hides were harvested, many lawmakers, government agencies, and private businessmen were in a hurry to lay track. The direction of most of the construction was east to west. The railroad companies would help bring civilization to the Great American Desert a lot faster than horses and wagons would. The creation of a transcontinental railroad would enable America to fulfill its “manifest destiny,” a phrase first used in 1845 in a magazine article by John L. O’Sullivan, who was describing the desire to unite the two halves of the country into one great nation. At least just as strong a motivation was that a railroad line that could take livestock and what farmers were harvesting as well as passengers from one part of the country to another in days instead of weeks could make its backers literally carloads of money.
Because of its central location, Kansas was especially attractive to railroad entrepreneurs. But in the rush to get out in front of the transcontinental effort, some initiatives went … off the rails. One prominent example was the Kansas Pacific Railroad, first known as the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western when the proslavery Kansas legislature created it in August 1855. Tracks were to be laid from Leavenworth west, following the Kansas River to Fort Riley and then following the Smoky Hill River to the 100th meridian.
Nothing happened for two years; then brothers Hugh and Thomas Ewing joined the LP and W. Their father was an Ohio senator. They were cousins of James G. Blaine, who would become a leading figure in the Republican Party, and brothers-in-law of an obscure army officer at the time, William Tecumseh Sherman. Thomas Ewing would later become chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.
Such a pedigree appeared promising. The brothers set about acquiring land grants from the U.S. government so track could be laid. When Indian tribes were found to be in the way, the Ewings worked out more treaties with them. But the process remained agonizingly slow. In 1863, a frustrated Thomas Ewing actually found enlisting in the Union Army to be more appealing. Two new players, Samuel Hallett and John C. Frémont, took over the company.
Frémont had achieved national fame in the 1840s as an explorer and for the best-selling books (actually written by his wife) about his adventures. He had lost to the Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 presidential election. However, his star had lost its luster after he was fired early in the Civil War by President Abraham Lincoln for losses as a Union general and harsh treatment of Missouri slave owners. Frémont was looking for a soft landing spot. Hallett, the younger man, actually knew something about building railroads. Thanks to his efforts, ground was finally broken for the renamed Union Pacific Eastern Division in December 1863.
Sadly for Hallett, this success led to his demise. The ineffective Frémont was pushed out in April 1864, and supporters of his in the company followed him out the door. One of them was Orlando Talcott, who wrote a report critical of Hallett to Washington. Learning of its contents, one of Hallett’s brothers looked Talcott up and slapped him in the face. That July, as Hallett walked to his office in Wyandotte, Kansas, Talcott approached him from behind and shot him in the back, killing him. Talcott offered his gun and to surrender to several people, including a police officer, but when no one took him up on it, he got on a horse and rode away. Hallett was about to preside over a ceremony for the opening of the first forty miles of track.
This was not the end of the UPED in Kansas. That December, the tracks reached Lawrence, then Topeka in 1865, Junction City the following year, and by September 1868 they were forty miles from the Colorado border. But without effective leadership the company lost its way. It would be up to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe to connect the rest of the state to the profitable markets elsewhere in America, and to be responsible for the growth of Dodge City into a significant town and a legend.
This railroad had gotten a later start than the ill-fated Kansas Pacific, but it made up for lost time. In 1859, a founder of Topeka, Cyrus Holliday, and several partners obtained a charter to build a railroad. It would begin at the Missouri River, specifically Atchison, and go to Topeka. Four years later, after this had been accomplished, the Lincoln administration gave Holliday a land grant to continue the railroad to the border of Kansas and Colorado, with the eventual destination to be Santa Fe. It apparently bothered no one that much of the land being granted belonged to Indian tribes. To keep the grant, the railroad had to reach the border by March 1873.
This it did. Along the way, settlements to house workers and those who catered to them sprang up. Colonel Dodge was the commander by the time the tracks reached the Fort Dodge area, in 1872, and they went straight past a small collection of wooden buildings that was known as Buffalo City.
Appropriately enough, the settlement had been founded so that men could drink whiskey. The colonel had assumed command of the post that spring. Echoing what a fictional captain would say in the film Casablanca seventy years later, Dodge was shocked that his soldiers were drinking within the fort’s walls and that some were even reporting for duty drunk. If any drinking were to be done, it had to be done elsewhere. The settlement near the new railroad tracks offered that opportunity.
That third uncontainable force came not from the east, like the railroad, or from the plains, like the buffalo, but from the south. After the surrender of Santa Anna to Sam Houston and the end of the Texas Revolution in 1836, inhabitants of the new republic found themselves with land and cattle left behind by Mexicans who, fearing revenge for the slaughter at the Alamo, had fled. The most durable of the cattle was the longhorn, which meant that these bulls and cows were the best candidates to survive long drives to markets.
“Long” is an understatement. Before the Civil War there were cattle drives to California and New Orleans as well as Kansas City. The longhorn proliferated, which meant increasing supply for Texas ranchers, and the demand was high enough, but the ordeal and the length of the drives made for a barely profitable business. During the war there were even more longhorns but fewer ranchers and many fewer markets, with most of the closer Confederate markets closed by enemy forces or unable to afford to buy much of the meat available.
Thus, there was a lot of pent-up supply when the war ended. At that time, it was estimated that there were five million longhorns in Texas. Meanwhile, there was increasing demand for beef in the reunified country, especially in industrialized northern and eastern cities. The coming of the railroads was like pulling the cork out of a bottle. Cattle drives couldn’t get going fast enough. It was a more tolerable trip to herd cattle from Texas to Kansas, the state right on the north side of the strip of land that was part of Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) and the Cimarron River. Less of an ordeal in transporting them meant more and fatter cattle surviving, and the soaring demand for meat plus the railroad providing faster travel to more major markets was a winning equation for the Texas ranchers, railroad operators, and ultimately the towns and cities along the way.
Dodge City was not the first to benefit by the intersection of a railroad and cattle drives. In 1861, a small settlement called Abilene, in Kansas a few miles north of the Smoky Hill River, consisted of a store, a blacksmith shop, a post office, and even a hotel. The town’s handful of residents expected that once the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through, there would be an increase in population. That didn’t happen, and there was very little business to be done. But when the Civil War ended and cattlemen from Texas resumed their drives north looking for railroad towns that would ship their cows to slaughterhouses to the north and east, Abilene was ready to make up for lost time.
However, for a year or so it was stymied by a quarantine on Texas longhorn cattle. They carried splenetic fever, which, inevitably, was called Spanish fever in Texas, and Texas fever by people outside of the state. Like Lyme disease today, this illness was transmitted by a tick. The Texas cattle were rarely sickened by the disease, but it was deadly to other cattle they encountered, such as those in Kansas. That state and Missouri enacted quarantine statutes. It was very frustrating to the would-be cattle barons that the railroad and shipping sites were enticingly right there but unavailable, as it also was to the would-be Kansas entrepreneurs, who saw their visions of riches and expanding towns turning into prairie dust.
Ultimately, the solution was to ignore the quarantine. In 1867 when thousands of head of cattle were driven north and sold, the proceeds far outweighed the fear of the fever. By the next year, Abilene was calling itself the “Queen of the Cowtowns.” Similar claims were made by residents and officials in other towns touched by the railroad—Ellsworth, Hays, Newton, and Wichita chief among them. While all would be eclipsed by the expanding settlement at the 100th meridian, two-thirds of the way west across the state, they did offer a preview of Dodge City’s near future. Abilene’s busiest year for cattle was 1871, and there were eleven bars in town. (At least it had Wild Bill Hickok keeping the peace.) Two years later, Wichita could offer fifteen watering holes for prairie-parched cowboys.
Despite its very humble origins as a place to get drunk, Buffalo City was poised to prosper. Robert Wright, George Hoover, and John McDonald are credited with being its first businessmen, with the latter two having set up a saloon inside a tent. The original name had been a rather obvious one, given all the hunting being done around the settlement. After Albert Alonzo Robinson, chief engineer of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, laid out the blueprint for the town in 1872, the tracks and the trains that rumbled on them arrived early that September. The ranchers and their cattle appeared soon afterward. Three important trails found their way there—the Military Road, the Tascosa Trail, and the Jones and Plummer Trail.
Seemingly overnight, wooden buildings and sidewalks were erected just north of the Arkansas River. The tracks went through the middle of what became Front Street, consisting mostly of one-story buildings, some of them still simple shacks. “Meanwhile, what a tremendous business was done in Dodge City!” exclaimed Wright. “For months and months there was no time when one could not get through the place on account of the blocking of the streets by hundreds of wagons—freighters, hunters and government teams. Almost any time during the day, there were about a hundred wagons on the streets, and dozens and dozens of camps all around the town, in every direction.” He added, “We were entirely without law and order.”
With such an abrupt transition of the town from watering hole to a center of Kansas commerce, its administration, such as it was, was not ready for the overwhelming influx of buffalo hunters, who would be followed by cowboys who had just spent anywhere from thirty to one hundred days on sunburnt, fly-infested trails and had pay in their pockets.
There was no police force when things got out of hand. The nearest law enforcement was seventy-five miles to the north, in Hays City. And cowboys were not the only problem. Buffalo City was renamed Dodge City—it would not be a formally incorporated city for another three years—and was on the edge of the frontier, a place that for a variety of reasons drew thieves, drunks, deserters, guerrillas still trying to relive the looting and pillaging days of the Civil War, and others with a price on their heads.
All this combined to put Dodge City in the late summer of 1872 on the precipice of being a totally lawless young town. It was inevitable that murder was one of the crimes committed. The first recorded killing in the new Dodge City was that of a man known as Black Jack, because he was indeed a black man. That September, a gambler called Denver yanked out a gun and used it on Black Jack in front of a saloon. The man fell dead in the street, and Denver walked away. Soon after, another black man, Jack Reynolds, was shot six times by a railroad worker, and he too died. In November, J. M. Essington, owner of a hotel bearing his name, was killed by the establishment’s cook.
Life in town quickly descended into chaos. Within a year fifteen men had been murdered, with the bodies being hauled up to the new cemetery, Boot Hill, for burial. It was into such lawless and dangerous surroundings that Bat Masterson, still a teenager, first arrived in Dodge City. Wyatt Earp would find his way there, too, and eventually both young men would be given badges and a mandate to tame a town on the brink of violent chaos.
Copyright © 2017 by Tom Clavin
