Dodge City, a frontier legend

The Santa Fe Trail carried heavy freight wagons through this area for fifty years before Dodge City was founded, and in 1865 Fort Dodge was established to protect wagon trains and support Plains troops during the Indian Wars. In the early years, millions of buffalo roamed the prairie, and in the 1870s hunters swarmed the region because hides and meat were valuable. Needing a place to buy supplies, and with news that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad would soon reach western Kansas, George M. Hoover opened the first business in June 1872, a saloon made from a board laid across two stacks of sod supports. Within weeks the new settlement had more saloons, dance halls, restaurants, stores, a barbershop, drugstore, and blacksmith shop. In August, settlers and officers from Fort Dodge organized a town first called Buffalo City, but because another Kansas community already had that name, they chose Dodge City. One month later the first train arrived, buffalo hides were already stacked for shipment east, and the city was open for business as wagons lined the streets bringing hides and meat and taking on supplies. At the foot of Boot Hill, a prominent bluff that overlooked the town and served as a convenient cemetery, George M. Hoover recalled that the first burial came in September 1872 after a man known as Black Jack was shot by a gambler named Denver. Hoover wrote that during the winter of 1872 and spring of 1873 no less than 15 men were killed in Dodge City and buried on Boot Hill, while Alice Chambers, who died in the spring of 1878, was reportedly the only woman buried there. Boot Hill's reputation spread widely, and Dodge City came to be remembered as a product of the frontier and of times and conditions that could not exist again.

Dodge City, Kansas · United States