"Queen of the Cowtowns" was the moniker historian Stanley Vestal bestowed on Dodge City, and the name stuck. The prairie town was certainly the most famous and longest lasting of the wild Kansas cattle towns that terminated the Chisholm and Western trails. Up from Texas came literally millions of long-horned cattle destined for the Kansas railheads and shipment east. They would feed a rapidly growing industrial nation. Infamous in its own day as a frontier Gomorrah, Dodge City has lived on in popular culture as the toughest of all the Western boomtowns, thanks to books-by popular writers including Vestal, Stuart Lake, Odie Faulk and Tom Clavin-but especially because of film and television (even outshining its pop culture rivals Tombstone and Deadwood).
The town was founded in the summer of 1872 by Col. Richard Dodge, along with several Army colleagues and post-sutler Robert Wright, on 87 acres of Ford County prairie near Fort Dodge in southwestern Kansas in hopes of capturing business traffic connected to the westward building Santa Fe Railroad. With the arrival of the railroad the astute founders saw an opportunity to seize a portion of the lucrative Texas cattle trade.
This story is from the June 2022 edition of True West.
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This story is from the June 2022 edition of True West.
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