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.
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:
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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.