According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a typical thunderstorm cloud holds around 275 million gallons of water. If you stand and watch Niagara Falls for six minutes, that’s how much water you’ll see.
But how much of that water actually falls out of the cloud and on to the ground, when it rains? That depends on two things: how big an area we’re talking about and how heavy a rainstorm it is.
Let’s imagine a typical suburban yard, a quarter of an acre in size, and a storm that releases ¼ of an inch of water. In that case, the yard receives almost 1,700 gallons of water from that storm alone.
What about a town of, say, 8,000 people, two square miles in size? From our ¼ inch rainstorm, that little town would receive over 8 ½ million gallons of water.
Of course, a storm that delivers ¼ inch of water is a pretty good storm, but there are plenty of storms that are stronger than that, too.
These buildings, called grain elevators, store harvested grain. The grain is lifted to the top and poured in, and then distributed from the bottom through gravity or mechanical means.
Although many people (myself included) associate grain elevators with the great plains, mechanized grain elevators originated in Buffalo, New York in 1843. Proximity to shipping opportunities on the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes made it useful to handle grain in bulk.
Though today we are accustomed to the idea of grain elevators, at one time they were regarded as unusual and innovative. When the architect Le Corbusier first saw one, he called it, “The first fruits of the new age.”
There is a story told that in the late 1880s a drunken man boarded a train heading west. He didn’t have a ticket, so the conductor asked him where he was bound. “I want to go to Hell,” the man said. The conductor immediately replied, “Get off at Dodge. One dollar, please.” The man’s destination is shown in the photo above, railroad tracks in the foreground.
Dodge City’s enduring reputation as a tough western town has come from a combination of facts and myth-making.
The facts: In the 1850s, cowboys drove cattle from the southwest to eastern Kansas towns such as Abilene, where herds were loaded on trains headed east. Unfortunately, ticks rode into town on the cattle. The ticks infected local cows with Texas cattle fever and as a result the Kansas government enacted a quarantine in 1876, prohibiting cattle drives from coming to the eastern part of the state.
At the time, the railroad had reached Dodge City, in southwest Kansas, and it became the new destination for cattle drives. Each year, thousands of cows passed through Dodge City’s stockyards, and up to 1884 the town grew rapidly. But in 1885, the state government extended the cattle drive quarantine to all of Kansas. Within a year Dodge City’s boom had ended.
But, back in 1872 and ’73 Dodge City had been a rough and dangerous place. It didn’t have organized law enforcement, and documents suggest that during that period at least 18 people were shot and killed in a single year, with a number of others wounded. Citizens, especially those making money from the cattle trade, weren’t happy with this level of lawlessness. They appointed law officers and banned open carrying of guns. Violence dropped dramatically, and there were hopes the town’s reputation would improve.
That’s where the myth-making came in. Newspapers and dime novels capitalized on that one year of extraordinary violence, and readers in the east were fascinated. Dodge City’s reputation was established, and sensational descriptions of the town continued to be written through the early 1900s by individuals who claimed to have been there during the 1870s and ’80s.
A 1913 article, “The Beginnings of Dodge City” by Robert M. Wright, talks about the “dead line.” According to the article, the term referred to, “… an imaginary line, running east and west, south of the railroad track in Dodge City, having particular reference to the danger of passing this line after nine o’clock of an evening, owing to the vicious character of certain citizens who haunted the south side. If a tenderfoot crossed this ‘dead’ line after the hour named, he was likely to become a ‘creature of circumstances’; and yet, there were men who did not heed the warning, and took their lives in their own hands.”
Another article, written in 1925 by William MacLeod Raine, reported on a skunk problem in Dodge City. According to Raine, during Dodge’s boom years the number of cowboys arriving with cattle drives overwhelmed available lodging, and people had to camp out. They slept on the ground, and on cold nights, local skunks were also looking for warm places to sleep. They found them in the bedrolls of sleeping cowboys. When the sleeper rolled over in the night, he thumped the skunk, and in return the outraged skunk bit him. Sometimes the cowboy died from the bite. This happened perhaps a dozen times, and for a while people thought Dodge City harbored a special animal, the “hydrophobia skunk.”
While the details of such stories can be doubted, it is certain that a number of frontier legends spent time in Dodge City, including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, and Doc Holliday. Their biographies list various occupations, but every one includes the description “gambler.” They moved about the frontier, stopping in towns populated by other gamblers, transient cowboys, and buffalo hunters.
These men were also known as gunfighters, and, perhaps as a result, each of them served at one time or another as a marshal or deputized lawman in Dodge City or another frontier town. But were their reputations justified? Were they really skilled at gunfighting? Here’s an indication: While all of them are known for certain to have participated in gunfights, not one of them died by being shot during such a fight. Indeed, one of Wild Bill Hickok’s biographers asserted that he killed “only” six or seven men in gunfights.
Nevertheless, Hickock died by the gun. He was shot from behind and killed while he was playing poker in a saloon in the Dakota Territory town of Deadwood. The cards he held are still called the dead man’s hand — two black aces and two black eights. His fifth card is unknown.
Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp fared better in post-gunfighter life. Masterson moved to New York city, became a newspaper sports columnist, and palled around with soon-to-be president Theodore Roosevelt. Wyatt Earp pursued a number of civilian occupations, including boxing referee. He died at home in Los Angeles, 80 years old.
And then there was John Henry “Doc” Holliday, described by one biographer as a “gambler, gunfighter, and dentist.”
Holliday’s sometime companion was Kate “Big Nose” Elder, who helped him escape from the law after a gunfight. She sought to reform him from his gambling and gunfighting ways and to return him to practicing dentistry. This task may have been made more difficult because Kate was known to be, on occasion, a practicing prostitute.
Holliday long suffered from tuberculosis, perhaps contracted while caring for his mother, who died from it. Apparently the disease did not impair his skill with a gun, and when a reporter brought up the men he had killed and asked whether they bothered his conscience, Holliday replied, “I coughed that up with my lungs, years ago.” He died of tuberculosis at the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood, Colorado, at the age of 36.
The fact that these men survived their gunfights meant they were not buried in a “boot hill,” a destination for those who died violently, presumably with their boots on. There was indeed a Dodge City Boot Hill, and it persists even today.
It turns out, though, that Dodge City’s Boot Hill was not unique. There have been at least forty-two “boot hills,” including forty in the U.S., one in New Westminster, British Columbia, and one in the city of Kuching, in the state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, in Malaysia.
Dodge City’s Boot Hill wasn’t even the first one in Kansas. That honor goes to Hays, Kansas, which apparently was the possessor of the first boot hill anywhere, ever. It was established five years before Dodge City was founded.
Today in Dodge City, folks wearing boots are expected to pursue tourist opportunities.
Boot Hill in Dodge City
And if you choose to do so, you won’t go hungry. There’s a restaurant next to Boot Hill, and, if you wish, you can arrive using cowboy-appropriate transportation:
“Saddle up, boys. Let’s go get us some vittles.”
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The articles mentioned above are posted on the website, Legends of America, which offers a rich trove of material on Dodge City (and lots of other places).
The four gunfighters discussed in this article led lives on the frontier that can only be described as adventurous. You can pass an entertaining evening reading about them on Wikipedia. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to imagine you’re gambling with them in a saloon, and knock back a shot of liquor or two in their honor.
This photo shows wagon wheel ruts from the heyday of the Santa Fe Trail, last used in 1880. I know they’re out there, because a sign nearby says they are.
The Santa Fe Trail was a commercial trail, rather than one of exploration or settling. This section, just west of Dodge City, is part of the “mountain route.” Travelers on it were headed for Bent’s Old Fort, which we’ll visit further west.
Wind turbines must be transported from manufacturer to wind farm, a potentially difficult task because of their size. The tallest wind turbine tower at the time this was written was over 700 feet high, or as high as a 70-story building. (That one’s in Denmark.) The largest individual wind turbine blade (so far) is over 240 feet long, almost as long as an American football field.
One firm that handles wind turbines before installation is Transportation Partners and Logistics, a Wyoming-based company with a large wind turbine storage and transportation facility (shown in the photos) on the east side of Garden City and next to Route 50.
Although wind turbines appear to rotate at a stately pace, the tips of the blades are actually moving very fast. The movement of the blades through the air makes noise. This noise annoys people, but there is hope. Researchers report having figured out what it is about an owl’s wings that enables it to fly so silently. Next step: try the owl approach on wind turbine blades.
Back at Backbone Mountain in Maryland, I asked you to guess where we would be when we finally reached a spot higher than we were on that summit, and here we are, just west of Lakin, Kansas, elevation 3,100 feet, compared to the 3,095 feet of Backbone Mountain.
The top photo looks east, or where we came from, and if you set off on Route 50 in that direction, you will never be higher during the 1,647 miles to Ocean City, Maryland, and the Atlantic Ocean.
This one looks north …
south …
and west (where we’re going):
Even though the terrain in Kansas appears largely flat along Route 50, elevation rises slowly from Kansas City (740 feet) to this point, a gain of 2,360 feet. It continues to rise until Route 50 reaches the base of the Rocky Mountains at Cañon City, Colorado (5,332 feet).
How did this rise in elevation occur?
One explanation is that, over eons of time, earth, rock, and other debris has washed down from the Rocky Mountains and gradually raised the plains, more near the mountains than near Kansas City.
Could this possibly be true?
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I’m going with it, because I don’t want to be labeled an erosion-from-the-Rocky-Mountains-caused-the-Great-Plains-to-rise denier.
Route 50 enters Colorado from Kansas on the high plains. It climbs the Rocky Mountains next to the Arkansas River and reaches the Continental Divide at Monarch Pass. In western Colorado, it crosses the Colorado River at Grand Junction.
There are a total of 465 diverse Route 50 miles from Kansas to Utah.
The “high plains” are the western area of the Great Plains. They are characterized by lesser rainfall and shorter grasses compared to the more easterly areas of the plains, such as the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve we visited in eastern Kansas.
(Here’s a high plains factoid I can’t resist mentioning, even though it happened far from Route 50. In January 1916, in Browning, Montana, the temperature fell 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 24 hours, from 44 degrees to minus 56 degrees. It is the largest 24-hour temperature change ever recorded, anywhere in the world.)
The Bent County courthouse in Las Animas, Colorado, on Route 50 in the High Plains
