Running the Roads-July 18-19

Sunday was a travel day as we headed west from Eldorado to Dodge City.  Dodge City, of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson fame.  Of course, Hugh O'Brien and Gene Barry were cast for their looks. The real guys didn't resemble them at all. We started at the Visitor Center with a Trolley Ride that lasted a good 45 minutes and traveled around the historic scenic spots of Dodge City.  Dodge reigned as Queen of the Cattletowns right after the Civil War.  Cattle were grown locally and brought in from other areas including Texas(the longhorns)and railroaded east. This lasted until the late 1970s when there was a quarrantine for Texas cattle due to a little bug that they carried. However, even today, cattle is the major industry of the area, making up about 60% of its economy.  The balance is agribusiness. I need to get a pix of the silos of grain.  The German immigrants brought a drought resistant wheat with them from the Old Country and it propered here.  One of the pix I plan to add to the blog today is of a feed lot.  The cattle come in at a moderate weight and are fattened up and then processed.  There is an aroma in the air that is foreign to city folk...need I say more?  Fort Dodge is about 5 miles east of the city and was abandoned by the gov't and sold to Kansas to use as "an old soldier's home".  It is still in use and has been the home of vets from the Civil War on.  A couple of the old buildings still stand, but most have been replaced over the last 150 years.  You know the forts from TV...the ones with wooden fencing around them?  Fort Dodge had no such protection as wood had to be freighted in first by wagon and then by RR.  Most of the early wooden buildings are gone, too because of wood and open flames for lighting and cooking. Dodge City actually wanted to forget its wild and wooly roots until 1939 and the film Dodge City which Hollywood premiered here.  Then came TV.  Matt Dillon is a composit of all the good traits of the lawmen and upstanding citizens who had settled here in the "West".  Yes, Kansas was the "West".   After our trolley tour we went to the Boot Hill Museum.  It is a replica of Front Street complete with shoot outs on a regular timetable.  The "shops" all house artifacts of early west Kansas. Buffalo, cattle, ranching, barb wire, brands; all these made the west what it was.  So did booze, gambling and soiled doves.  All that had, however, to happen south of the tracks.  North of the tracks lived the solid. proper citizens who turned the "end of tracks town" into the city it resembles today.  In the 1870s the Rev. Ormond Wright began preaching in saloons and dance halls. By 1876 he had his own churh: The First Union Church.  The congregation was composed of 13 citizens (in a town of 1,000 according to the census).  It was a great museum tour that included the Plains People's contribution.  Chief Seattle(I don't know what tribe)wrote some pretty Christian-like sayings that were posted within the exhibit.  That's my next search....to find out more about him.  An ice cream completed our day and tomorrow we are on the road again.