Dodge - A Story of the Old Hell-raising Trail's End Where the Colt Was King by William MacLeod Raine in 1925

KANSAS LEGENDS

Dodge - Old Hell-Raising Trail's End

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By William MacLeod Raine in 1925

It was in the days when the new railroad was pushing through the country of the plains Indians that a drunken cowboy got on the train at a way station in Kansas. John Bender, the conductor, asked him for his ticket. He had none, but he pulled out a handful of gold pieces.

"I wantta--g-go to--h-hell," he hiccoughed.

Bender did not hesitate an instant. "Get off at Dodge. One dollar, please."

Dodge City did not get its name because so many of its citizens were or had been, in the Texas phrase, on the dodge. It came quite respectably by its cognomen.

Dodge City, Kansas, 1876.

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The town was laid out by A. A. Robinson, chief engineer of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and it was called for Colonel Richard I. Dodge, commander of the post at Fort Dodge and one of the founders of the place. It is worth noting this, because it is one of the few respectable facts in the early history of the cowboy capital. Dodge was a wild and uncurried prairie wolf, and it howled every night and all night long. It was gay and young and lawless. Its sense of humor was exaggerated and worked overtime. The crack of the six-shooter punctuated its hilarity ominously. Those who dwelt there were the valiant vanguard of civilization. For good or bad they were strong and forceful, many of them generous and big-hearted in spite of their lurid lives. The town was a hive of energy. One might justly use many adjectives about it, but the word respectable is not among them.

There were three reasons why Dodge won the reputation of being the wildest town the country had ever seen. In 1872 it was the end of the track, the last jumping-off spot into the wilderness, and in the days when transcontinental railroads were building across the desert the temporary terminus was always a gathering place of roughs and scalawags. The payroll was large, and gamblers, gunmen, and thugs gathered for the pickings. This was true of Hays, Abilene, Ogallala, and Kit Carson. It was true of Las Vegas and Albuquerque.

A second reason was that Dodge was the end of the long trail drive from Texas. Every year hundreds of thousands of longhorns were driven up from Texas by cowboys scarcely less wild than the hill steers they herded. The Great Plains country was being opened, and cattle were needed to stock a thousand ranches as well as to supply the government at Indian reservations. Scores of these trail herds were brought to Dodge for shipment, and after the long, dangerous, drive the punchers were keen to spend their money on such diversions as the town could offer. Out of sheer high spirits they liked to shoot up the town, to buck the tiger, to swagger from saloon to gambling hall, their persons garnished with revolvers, the spurs on their high-heeled boots jingling. In no spirit of malice they wanted it distinctly understood that they owned the town. As one of them once put it, he was born high up on the Guadeloupe, raised on prickly pear, had palled with alligators and quarreled with grizzlies.

Also, Dodge was the heart of the buffalo country. Here the hunters were outfitted for the chase. From here great quantities of hides were shipped back on the new railroad. R. M. Wright, one of the founders of the town and always one of its leading citizens, says that his firm alone shipped two hundred thousand hides in one season.

He estimates the number of buffalos in the country at more than twenty-five million, admitting that many, as well informed as he. put the figure at four times as many. Many times he and others traveled through the vast herds for days at a time without ever losing sight of them.

40,000 buffalo hides are piled in Rath & Wright's Buffalo Hide Yard in 1878. Courtesy National Archives.

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The killing of buffaloes was easy, because the animals were so stupid. When one was shot they would mill round and round. Tom Nixon killed 120 in forty minutes; in a little more than a month he slaughtered 2,173 of them. With good luck a man could earn a hundred dollars a day. If he had bad luck he lost his scalp.

The buffalo was to the plains Indian food, fuel, and shelter. As long as there were plenty of buffaloes he was in Paradise. But he saw at once that this slaughter would soon exterminate the supply. He hated the hunter and battled against his encroachments. The buffalo hunter was an intrepid plainsman. He fought Kiowas, Comanches, and the Staked Plain Apaches, as well as the Sioux and the Arapaho. Famous among these hunters were Kirk Jordan, Charles Rath, Emanuel Dubbs, Jack Bridges, and Curly Walker. Others even better known were the two Buffalo Bills (William Cody and William Mathewson) and Wild Bill.

These three factors then made Dodge: it was the end of the railroad, the terminus of the cattle trail from Texas the center of the buffalo trade. Together they made it "the beautiful bibulous Babylon of the frontier," in the words of the editor of the Kingsley Graphic. There was to come a time later when the bibulous Babylon fell on evil days and its main source of income was old bones. They were buffalo bones, gathered in wagons, and piled beside the track for shipment, hundreds and hundreds of carloads of them, to be used for fertilizer. (I have seen great quantities of such bones as far north as the Canadian Pacific line, corded for shipment to a factory.) It used to be said by way of derision that buffalo bones were legal tender in Dodge.

Continued Next Page

Buffalo Bones

A man stands atop a huge pile of buffalo bones.

Also See:

The Beginnings of Dodge City

Dodge City -- A Wicked Little Town

Dodge City Historical Text

Fort Dodge History and Hauntings

John Henry "Doc" Holliday - Deadly Doctor of the Frontier

The Long Branch Saloon

Long Branch Saloon Shootout

Populating Boot Hill

Wyatt Earp - Frontier Lawman of the American West

Cowboys and wagons gather in Dodge City in the late 1800's.

This image available for photographic prints HERE!

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