One of my favorite subjects in elementary school was the ‘Wild Wild West! How I poured over the stories about the outlaws and the men that chased them!
Dodge City was one of the places that most intrigued me and today I got to walk it’s streets!. It was a wide-open town in the 1800s. There is a replica now of It’s once infamous Front Street. “At one time it was one of the wildest places on the frontier. Cattlemen, buffalo hunters, soldiers, settlers, gunfighters, railroad men and mule skinners thronged the streets to the delight of the card sharks, brothel keepers and morticians!”
This fellow was behind the bar at the ‘Long Branch Saloon’ in Dodge City’s replica of Front Street as it appeared in the 1870s.
The Boot Hill Cemetery was used from 1872 to 1879 to bury drifters, troublemakers and unknowns. There were no ceremonies for the dead; the graves were unmarked…and shallow. Often the bodies were dug up shortly after burial by wolves. What a sorry place to end your days upon this earth…
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were among the few able to control the lawlessness of Dodge City.Oh, those names…It still gives me chills to read about them.