Dodge City, Kansas: How a Cattle Tick Built the Wildest Town in the West

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Dodge City began with a sod house and a bar in a tent. Rancher Henry L. Sitler built the house near Fort Dodge in 1871, the town was staked out in 1872 on the hundredth meridian, and George M. Hoover opened the first business, selling liquor to soldiers. When the Santa Fe Railroad arrived that September, the main trade was buffalo hides and bones. The cattle came later, and for a reason nobody planned. Texas longhorns carried ticks that killed Kansas cattle, so the state drew a quarantine line and kept moving it west. By 1876 Abilene was cut off, and the herds were funneled to Dodge.

This episode follows the real town behind the phrase get the heck out of Dodge through each of its lives. There is the boom of 1883 and 1884, with Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday on the streets and vice confined to one side of the railroad tracks. There is the collapse, when the quarantine covered all of Kansas. Then come the reinventions: a motorcycle racing capital in 1914, and today a meatpacking city of just under 28,000 people, nearly 64 percent Hispanic or Latino, that sells tickets to the past it once tried to bury.

• Two earlier outposts on the Santa Fe Trail failed before Fort Dodge. Fort Mann, built in 1847, collapsed within a year, and the Army abandoned Fort Atkinson, built in 1850.
• In 1884 the town staged a bullfight with imported Mexican bullfighters and specially chosen aggressive Texas longhorns.
• To clean up its image, Dodge dug up the bodies on Boot Hill and built a schoolhouse on top of the old graveyard.
• At the 300 mile motorcycle race on July 4, 1914, a Harley-Davidson team rider carried a piglet on victory laps, the origin of the nickname hogs.
• In 2018 the city's roughly 13,000 registered voters had a single polling place, which was moved a mile outside the city limits. A lawsuit ended after the county clerk agreed to open a second site.