In the fall of 1870, Hiram C. Bull and Lyman T. Earl left Cawker City, Kansas, to establish a new town in the South Fork Solomon River valley, where bluffs 200 feet high rose above a wide bend in the river, and they laid out the first town site in Osborne County. A nickel toss led to the name Bull City rather than Earlsville. In May 1871, the Bull City Post Office opened in Bull's general store with Hiram Bull as the first postmaster. Bull became commercially and socially central to the early development of the town and the wider region, but in October 1879 he and two other men were killed by Bull's pet elk, an event that made national headlines and permanently changed the town's future. Bull had been a beloved civic leader, county probate judge, and was serving his second term as a Kansas State Representative at the time of his death. His funeral drew nearly 2,000 mourners from across the region, the largest funeral yet held in north-central and northwest Kansas. About five years later, supporters began a movement to change the town's name because the word bull was considered offensive in polite company and thought by some to hinder the town's growth. After a legal petition failed, a fraudulent petition was sent to Washington, D.C., using signatures cut from a road petition and pasted onto the name-change petition. In February 1885, the U.S. Postal Department changed the name to Alton, after Alton, Illinois, the hometown of the leader of the name-change effort, and on October 1, 1885, Alton was incorporated as a third-class city.