Dodge City Read online

  But in March 1865, the “hostiles” were back, with an estimated two thousand Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache camped south of the Arkansas River. To tackle such a big task, Ford told his commander that he would need a fort as a base of operations. This resulted the following month in construction beginning on a new post on the north bank of the Arkansas River, twenty-two miles east of Cimarron Crossing. It was named Fort Dodge. General Grenville Dodge believed it was named after him, and it may have been, but there was also a Colonel Richard Irving Dodge who would be stationed there and eventually become the fort’s commanding officer.

  In 1883, after spending two years as aide-de-camp to General William Tecumseh Sherman, Colonel Dodge published a book titled Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West. Unlike the lurid tales about bloodthirsty Indians, which were quick to find audiences in the eastern United States and in Europe, Dodge’s writings were mostly favorable, and he wrote about his experience: “For many years past I have been the most fortunately situated for such study, having been stationed directly among the wild tribes, whose characteristics have always been of most interest to me.”

  By the way, Colonel Ford would not be overlooked. Two years later, in 1867, when a new county was created, it was named Ford County.

  Plans for a postwar campaign against the Indians—they were now the intruders—were dashed when the Andrew Johnson administration insisted on negotiating a new treaty, and emissaries were sent west to do so. The Treaty of Little Arkansas River was drawn up and “signed” by the tribes’ leaders. Because the native residents could not read or write English and certainly did not have signatures to affix to these mysterious papers, when an Indian leader or “chief” (a title invented by the white man) agreed to whatever had been read to him, he touched the pen held by an army scribe, who then wrote the Indian’s name on the document. The Little Arkansas treaty gave the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache the right to hunt seasonally but otherwise be confined to reservations. With no fighting to do, in between forays to patrol along the Santa Fe Trail the army soldiers were put to work improving and expanding the fort.

  These efforts didn’t do much good. The compound and most everyone living in it were flooded during spring rains. The prairie heat of the summer was unbearable, and the troopers were riddled by a variety of diseases, exacerbated by the poor diet and poorer sanitary conditions. The autumn offered some respite, but the harsh winter with its seemingly incessant blizzards bottled the men up within the wooden walls. No doubt by the spring of 1866, the officers and troopers had to wonder why anyone would want to live in the area—and in any part of Kansas for that matter. They couldn’t wait to be relieved and sent … anywhere.

  Still, Fort Dodge endured, providing supplies, horses, livestock, shelter, and some support for campaigns to round up Indians who had left reservations to roam north from Oklahoma to hunt. The campaign in 1867 was led by two Civil War heroes, General Winfield Hancock and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry. Battles were few and far between because as the army forces grew more daunting with their numbers and more advanced in their weapons, the Indians, with the dwindling populations of the tribes, could not put up much of a fight.

  Again, what would become Dodge City might well have been nothing more than a frontier settlement supporting the inhabitants of a fort but for three uncontainable forces that intersected there: buffalo, railroads, and longhorn cattle from Texas.

  The number of American bison on the Great Plains, including Kansas, indeed was an uncontainable and seemingly inexhaustible force. There were estimates contending that as many as seventy million buffalo blanketed the Plains by the mid-1800s, a substantial leap from Coronado’s day. Men reported riding through a herd for more than one hundred miles. Others claimed that when they arrived at the top of a promontory and looked down, there were grazing buffalo as far as they could see.

  Hundreds of men came west and south to kill the buffalo and sell their hides. An excellent place to hunt was in the vicinity of Fort Dodge. Hopefuls opened up simple stores housing supplies for the hunters, joining the crude saloons that were supplying the soldiers with whiskey. Henry Stitler, a teamster, constructed a sod house, and a hunter, Charlie Myers, built a trading post right next door to the fort.

  As more buffalo hides were harvested, many lawmakers, government agencies, and private businessmen were in a hurry to lay track. The direction of most of the construction was east to west. The railroad companies would help bring civilization to the Great American Desert a lot faster than horses and wagons would. The creation of a transcontinental railroad would enable America to fulfill its “manifest destiny,” a phrase first used in 1845 in a magazine article by John L. O’Sullivan, who was describing the desire to unite the two halves of the country into one great nation. At least just as strong a motivation was that a railroad line that could take livestock and what farmers were harvesting as well as passengers from one part of the country to another in days instead of weeks could make its backers literally carloads of money.

  Because of its central location, Kansas was especially attractive to railroad entrepreneurs. But in the rush to get out in front of the transcontinental effort, some initiatives went … off the rails. One prominent example was the Kansas Pacific Railroad, first known as the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western when the proslavery Kansas legislature created it in August 1855. Tracks were to be laid from Leavenworth west, following the Kansas River to Fort Riley and then following the Smoky Hill River to the 100th meridian.

  Nothing happened for two years; then brothers Hugh and Thomas Ewing joined the LP and W. Their father was an Ohio senator. They were cousins of James G. Blaine, who would become a leading figure in the Republican Party, and brothers-in-law of an obscure army officer at the time, William Tecumseh Sherman. Thomas Ewing would later become chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.

  Such a pedigree appeared promising. The brothers set about acquiring land grants from the U.S. government so track could be laid. When Indian tribes were found to be in the way, the Ewings worked out more treaties with them. But the process remained agonizingly slow. In 1863, a frustrated Thomas Ewing actually found enlisting in the Union Army to be more appealing. Two new players, Samuel Hallett and John C. Frémont, took over the company.

  Frémont had achieved national fame in the 1840s as an explorer and for the best-selling books (actually written by his wife) about his adventures. He had lost to the Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 presidential election. However, his star had lost its luster after he was fired early in the Civil War by President Abraham Lincoln for losses as a Union general and harsh treatment of Missouri slave owners. Frémont was looking for a soft landing spot. Hallett, the younger man, actually knew something about building railroads. Thanks to his efforts, ground was finally broken for the renamed Union Pacific Eastern Division in December 1863.

  Sadly for Hallett, this success led to his demise. The ineffective Frémont was pushed out in April 1864, and supporters of his in the company followed him out the door. One of them was Orlando Talcott, who wrote a report critical of Hallett to Washington. Learning of its contents, one of Hallett’s brothers looked Talcott up and slapped him in the face. That July, as Hallett walked to his office in Wyandotte, Kansas, Talcott approached him from behind and shot him in the back, killing him. Talcott offered his gun and to surrender to several people, including a police officer, but when no one took him up on it, he got on a horse and rode away. Hallett was about to preside over a ceremony for the opening of the first forty miles of track.

  This was not the end of the UPED in Kansas. That December, the tracks reached Lawrence, then Topeka in 1865, Junction City the following year, and by September 1868 they were forty miles from the Colorado border. But without effective leadership the company lost its way. It would be up to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe to connect the rest of the state to the profitable markets elsewhere in America, and to be responsible for
the growth of Dodge City into a significant town and a legend.

  This railroad had gotten a later start than the ill-fated Kansas Pacific, but it made up for lost time. In 1859, a founder of Topeka, Cyrus Holliday, and several partners obtained a charter to build a railroad. It would begin at the Missouri River, specifically Atchison, and go to Topeka. Four years later, after this had been accomplished, the Lincoln administration gave Holliday a land grant to continue the railroad to the border of Kansas and Colorado, with the eventual destination to be Santa Fe. It apparently bothered no one that much of the land being granted belonged to Indian tribes. To keep the grant, the railroad had to reach the border by March 1873.

  This it did. Along the way, settlements to house workers and those who catered to them sprang up. Colonel Dodge was the commander by the time the tracks reached the Fort Dodge area, in 1872, and they went straight past a small collection of wooden buildings that was known as Buffalo City.

  Appropriately enough, the settlement had been founded so that men could drink whiskey. The colonel had assumed command of the post that spring. Echoing what a fictional captain would say in the film Casablanca seventy years later, Dodge was shocked that his soldiers were drinking within the fort’s walls and that some were even reporting for duty drunk. If any drinking were to be done, it had to be done elsewhere. The settlement near the new railroad tracks offered that opportunity.

  That third uncontainable force came not from the east, like the railroad, or from the plains, like the buffalo, but from the south. After the surrender of Santa Anna to Sam Houston and the end of the Texas Revolution in 1836, inhabitants of the new republic found themselves with land and cattle left behind by Mexicans who, fearing revenge for the slaughter at the Alamo, had fled. The most durable of the cattle was the longhorn, which meant that these bulls and cows were the best candidates to survive long drives to markets.

  “Long” is an understatement. Before the Civil War there were cattle drives to California and New Orleans as well as Kansas City. The longhorn proliferated, which meant increasing supply for Texas ranchers, and the demand was high enough, but the ordeal and the length of the drives made for a barely profitable business. During the war there were even more longhorns but fewer ranchers and many fewer markets, with most of the closer Confederate markets closed by enemy forces or unable to afford to buy much of the meat available.

  Thus, there was a lot of pent-up supply when the war ended. At that time, it was estimated that there were five million longhorns in Texas. Meanwhile, there was increasing demand for beef in the reunified country, especially in industrialized northern and eastern cities. The coming of the railroads was like pulling the cork out of a bottle. Cattle drives couldn’t get going fast enough. It was a more tolerable trip to herd cattle from Texas to Kansas, the state right on the north side of the strip of land that was part of Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) and the Cimarron River. Less of an ordeal in transporting them meant more and fatter cattle surviving, and the soaring demand for meat plus the railroad providing faster travel to more major markets was a winning equation for the Texas ranchers, railroad operators, and ultimately the towns and cities along the way.

  Dodge City was not the first to benefit by the intersection of a railroad and cattle drives. In 1861, a small settlement called Abilene, in Kansas a few miles north of the Smoky Hill River, consisted of a store, a blacksmith shop, a post office, and even a hotel. The town’s handful of residents expected that once the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through, there would be an increase in population. That didn’t happen, and there was very little business to be done. But when the Civil War ended and cattlemen from Texas resumed their drives north looking for railroad towns that would ship their cows to slaughterhouses to the north and east, Abilene was ready to make up for lost time.

  However, for a year or so it was stymied by a quarantine on Texas longhorn cattle. They carried splenetic fever, which, inevitably, was called Spanish fever in Texas, and Texas fever by people outside of the state. Like Lyme disease today, this illness was transmitted by a tick. The Texas cattle were rarely sickened by the disease, but it was deadly to other cattle they encountered, such as those in Kansas. That state and Missouri enacted quarantine statutes. It was very frustrating to the would-be cattle barons that the railroad and shipping sites were enticingly right there but unavailable, as it also was to the would-be Kansas entrepreneurs, who saw their visions of riches and expanding towns turning into prairie dust.

  Ultimately, the solution was to ignore the quarantine. In 1867 when thousands of head of cattle were driven north and sold, the proceeds far outweighed the fear of the fever. By the next year, Abilene was calling itself the “Queen of the Cowtowns.” Similar claims were made by residents and officials in other towns touched by the railroad—Ellsworth, Hays, Newton, and Wichita chief among them. While all would be eclipsed by the expanding settlement at the 100th meridian, two-thirds of the way west across the state, they did offer a preview of Dodge City’s near future. Abilene’s busiest year for cattle was 1871, and there were eleven bars in town. (At least it had Wild Bill Hickok keeping the peace.) Two years later, Wichita could offer fifteen watering holes for prairie-parched cowboys.

  Despite its very humble origins as a place to get drunk, Buffalo City was poised to prosper. Robert Wright, George Hoover, and John McDonald are credited with being its first businessmen, with the latter two having set up a saloon inside a tent. The original name had been a rather obvious one, given all the hunting being done around the settlement. After Albert Alonzo Robinson, chief engineer of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, laid out the blueprint for the town in 1872, the tracks and the trains that rumbled on them arrived early that September. The ranchers and their cattle appeared soon afterward. Three important trails found their way there—the Military Road, the Tascosa Trail, and the Jones and Plummer Trail.

  Seemingly overnight, wooden buildings and sidewalks were erected just north of the Arkansas River. The tracks went through the middle of what became Front Street, consisting mostly of one-story buildings, some of them still simple shacks. “Meanwhile, what a tremendous business was done in Dodge City!” exclaimed Wright. “For months and months there was no time when one could not get through the place on account of the blocking of the streets by hundreds of wagons—freighters, hunters and government teams. Almost any time during the day, there were about a hundred wagons on the streets, and dozens and dozens of camps all around the town, in every direction.” He added, “We were entirely without law and order.”

  With such an abrupt transition of the town from watering hole to a center of Kansas commerce, its administration, such as it was, was not ready for the overwhelming influx of buffalo hunters, who would be followed by cowboys who had just spent anywhere from thirty to one hundred days on sunburnt, fly-infested trails and had pay in their pockets.

  There was no police force when things got out of hand. The nearest law enforcement was seventy-five miles to the north, in Hays City. And cowboys were not the only problem. Buffalo City was renamed Dodge City—it would not be a formally incorporated city for another three years—and was on the edge of the frontier, a place that for a variety of reasons drew thieves, drunks, deserters, guerrillas still trying to relive the looting and pillaging days of the Civil War, and others with a price on their heads.

  All this combined to put Dodge City in the late summer of 1872 on the precipice of being a totally lawless young town. It was inevitable that murder was one of the crimes committed. The first recorded killing in the new Dodge City was that of a man known as Black Jack, because he was indeed a black man. That September, a gambler called Denver yanked out a gun and used it on Black Jack in front of a saloon. The man fell dead in the street, and Denver walked away. Soon after, another black man, Jack Reynolds, was shot six times by a railroad worker, and he too died. In November, J. M. Essington, owner of a hotel bearing his name, was killed by the establishment’s cook.

  Life in town quickly des
cended into chaos. Within a year fifteen men had been murdered, with the bodies being hauled up to the new cemetery, Boot Hill, for burial. It was into such lawless and dangerous surroundings that Bat Masterson, still a teenager, first arrived in Dodge City. Wyatt Earp would find his way there, too, and eventually both young men would be given badges and a mandate to tame a town on the brink of violent chaos.

  TWO

  I had a six-shooter in my belt and could have stood the ten others off. There wasn’t a one of them with any sand if you stood up to them, but they all had mean tempers and they were all thieves.

  —WYATT EARP (age 16)

  The man who came to be the most familiar image of the American West lawman did not even hail from anywhere west of the Mississippi River, but from Illinois. Born on March 19, 1848, Wyatt Earp was the sixth child of Nicholas Earp and the fourth with his second wife, Virginia Ann Cooksey. By the time Nicholas, who would not die until 1907 at age ninety-four and was one of nine children, was finished procreating, he had done his father one better, fathering ten children—six sons and four daughters.

  The overall Earp story began even farther away, in Staffordshire, England, where John Earpe was born around 1600. His son, Thomas, was born in Ireland in 1631. Thomas Jr., also born in Ireland, in 1665, was the first to spell his last name without the second “e” and the first to set foot on American soil, settling in Virginia. One of his sons was Joshua, born in 1700, and William Earp was born to him in 1729. One of his nine children, Philip, born in 1755, fought with fellow patriots in the American Revolution and was the first to leave Virginia, moving to Lincoln County in the western half of North Carolina. One of his sons, Walter, born in 1787, was a teacher, a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and later a justice of the peace. He and his wife, Martha Ann Early, added to the young country’s population with their nine children. Their third child and second son, Nicholas Porter Earp, was born on September 6, 1813. The Earp family picked up stakes and moved to Tennessee, then to Kentucky. Only fifteen days after the birth of Nicholas, Abigail Storm was born, the woman who was to become Nicholas’s first wife. They were married twenty-three years later, on December 22, 1836, in Kentucky.