Reimagining Dodge Appendices A

APPENDIX A DODGE CITY HISTORICAL ESSAY William M. Hunter, M.A. Heberling Associates, Inc. A-1 Dodge City Although seemingly remote, Dodge City has always linked to the broader world in important ways. Dodge City, working through the urban centers of the Middle West, was the meeting place of country and city where cattlemen from the prairie states accessed eastern markets (Cronon 1991:211-212). Indeed, the ecological transformation of mixed prairie into the current agriculture is but one manifestation of the interpenetration of city and country that continues to characterize the production of landscape (Cronon 1991: 212). The settlement of the area around Dodge by migrants from the Old Northwest introduced agents of landscape change into a new environment, one dependent on weather and climate and subject to drought (Cronon 1991:214). Only through extensive irrigation and the development of special techniques could farmers consistently produce staple crops, forcing many to adapt to the conditions and turn from the cultivation of wheat to the raising of livestock. However, if livestock was to become the foundation of a new western agriculture, farmers and ranchers had to transform the landscape by confining or eliminating its original human and animal inhabitants, particularly the vast millions of American bison (Cronon 1991:214). Prior to advent of the railroad, the herd of bison was a defining feature of the grasslands. With the introduction of the world economy into the region, market and sport hunters prized the bison, like the earlier furbearing animals of the east and upper Midwest, as commodities (Cronon 1991:216). The perfection of tanning bison hide by 1870 doomed the herds. Richard Dodge noted “Buffalo were slaughtered without sense or discretion . where there were myriads of Buffalo the year before there are now myriads of carcasses” (Cronon 1991:216). In Kansas, the culling of the herd peaked between 1870 and 1873, and within four years of the introduction of the railroad and a market for hides, over four million buffalo were exterminated from the southern plains, sealing the fate of the Great Plains Indians whose ecological livelihood system was destroyed (Cronon 1991:217). With the culling of the buffalo, hunters and others turned to horses, sheep, and longhorn cattle as a replacement for the native stock. The economic disruption and embargos of the Civil War era led to the explosion in the population of longhorn cattle in Texas, and with southern markets shattered by the war, post war entrepreneurs discovered that a longhorn was worth far more in the eastern markets, and searched for ways to get the surplus cattle to market. They needed a place were the southern drover and northern buyer could meet to do business (Cronon 1991:218-219). The rapid construction of the Santa Fe Railroad across western Kansas along the north bank of the Arkansas River led to formation of land and town improvement companies, intent on staking a claim along the railroad line. The Dodge City Town Company, a combination of military officers and Santa Fe planners, established their claim in August 1872, a full month before the formal survey of the railroad through the area (Shortridge 2004:146). Dodge was developed in relationship with the 100th meridian, which not only demarcated the limits of federal land, but also the limits of military law, allowing Dodge City to grow by providing liquor and entertainment. Beyond that, the city was to occupy the A-2 southern most point on the Santa Fe mainline, west of the meridian in an area considered too droughty to provide for regular agricultural settlement, opening it to extensive use by the cattle trade (Shortridge 2004:147). In 1867, Texas longhorns were first shipped from Kansas to Chicago, an era of the great cattle drives had begun. The Santa Fe railroad was active in promoting Dodge as a cattle town, wide-open lands well suited to the needs of drovers, by developing a two-mile long stockyard along its tracks. The traffic blossomed, from 9,540 head of cattle in the first season (1876) to 65,000 head of cattle by 1882 (Shortridge 2004:147). To support its operations, the railroad invested in additional facilities, including pens and machine shops. Dodge City therefore developed as both a cattle town and as a railroad town (Shortridge 2004:147). The great cattle drives, the interpenetration of city and county, are what gave Dodge City both its history, and its heritage. The cowboy, now a mythical figure, was above all an agent whose essential task was to deliver a fattened herd to the metropolitan market, “a wage worker whose task was to ship meat to cities”(Cronon 1991:219-220). Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell, and Dodge City all briefly reigned as the principal terminus of the herd driven north from Texas. However, the reign was short lived. With the continued immigration of settlers, intent on farming and infill of countryside surrounding the railheads, tensions between Texas cowboys and Kansas farmers, who grappled with the destruction and diseases carried by the longhorns, led to government intervention and a quarantine on Texas cattle. With the enclosure of the commons and the assertion of local agricultural interests, the cattle trade shifted to the north and west. The range had given way to ranches across the short grass prairie. With the establishment of livestock ranching, the ecological transformation of the regional landscape began in earnest, with herds now confined within property boundaries, and interests competed to secure rights to the best grazing land and any source of water, bringing subtle shifts in regional vegetation (Cronon 1991:221). Further, the practice of ranching also heralded the era of enclosure, as the recently (1873) perfected barbed wire fences soon demarked property, formed barriers to movement, and help to transform prairie into pasture (Cronon 1991:221). The flood of grass fed cattle into the eastern markets forced the cattle producers of the Old Northwest to innovate, to take advantage of their regional situation, and overcome high land values and smaller farm size. Their innovation was the development of the feedlot for fattening young cattle from the plains on Midwestern corn. Thus, Longhorn drives in Texas, cattle towns in Kansas, and feedlots in Illinois became linked together in a “new animal landscape that was governed as much by economics and ecology” (Cronon 1991:224). The consolidation of the stock trade in Chicago and its logic of efficiency, which initially funneled the stock into Illinois from a vast region, soon led the dispersal of the meat packing industry back into hinterland. By the 1880s, the successful models of livestock processing were applied throughout the Midwest and plains states, in Kansas City, Omaha, A-3 East St. Louis and St. Joseph (Cronon 1991:257). By the turn of the century, the combined output of former hinterland rivaled that of Chicago. With the collapse of the early cattle trade, Dodge City found itself in a stronger position than other western boomtowns. The relative fertility of the region’s soil, the persistence of grazing land, and the development of Dodge as the seat of Ford County and distribution center for the emerging agricultural economy ensured its economic viability in the wake of the bust. In 1883, the entrepreneur Asa T. Soule founded the Eureka Irrigation Canal Company to divert water from the Arkansas River for farm use. Soule had invested heavily in Dodge City, donating land for a college that would eventually become the site of St. Mary of the Plains College. For four years, hundreds of workers constructed a canal from a point twenty miles upriver from Dodge across country to the community of Spearville, a canal nearly twenty miles in length. Opened in 1888, the canal briefly relieved the threat of drought, although changes to the climate and the lowering of the water table soon made the canal obsolete, prefiguring the desiccation of the Arkansas River. The aggressive development and promotion of the town in the early twentieth century is evident throughout the landscape. Progressive local elites embraced planning, municipal reform, a city-manger plan of government, and an ethic of civic improvement to tame the rougher edges of the former frontier town. The development of landmark buildings, including the 1906 Dodge City municipal building, 1913 Ford County courthouse, 1917 country club, and 1929 city hall represents the desire of local elites to create a civic landscape beyond that of the western myth (Faulk 1977:193). The sparse population of the region also slowed the development of competing urban centers, although the three population centers of Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal emerged, each to control trade without rivalry with the others prior to the automobile era (Shortridge 2004:264). Yet, in spite of a concerted exorcism, the debt to the cowboy and longhorn persisted throughout the local scene. For example, among the artifacts that have been collected on Boot Hill is Dr. O.H. Simpson’s cement statue of a cowboy, relocated to Boot Hill from the lawn of city hall to join his statue of two steer heads. The invocations of the plaques at the base of the statues expressed a sentiment that, at the time, was viewed as backward looking: “on the ashes of my campfire this city is built” and “my trails have become your highways” (Faulk 1977:195). Throughout mid-century, the Dodge City economy was buoyed by its county seat functions, the ongoing operation of the Santa Fe repair shops, the small regional wholesalers, the Dodge City Flour Mill – a symbol of large scale grain farming – and development of St. Mary of the Plains College as the only institution of higher learning in the region (Shortridge 2004:264).

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