Dodge City, Kansas, has become the enduring symbol of the American Wild West, but the reality of its violence and lawlessness is far more complex than the legend suggests. The town earned its notorious reputation during a single chaotic year before it was even officially organized, and the celebrated gunfighting era that followed was actually marked by relative order and very few killings. The history of the area stretches back more than a decade before the city’s founding. The Santa Fe Trail, opened in 1821, carried thousands of wagons past the site, and the region had been home to various Indigenous peoples for centuries.
A stone spear point found north of Dodge, buried beneath the remains of an extinct bison species, was dated at over 10,000 years old. The first white settlement near the future town was Fort Mann, built in 1847 to protect trail travelers, but it was abandoned within a year. The army later built Fort Atkinson in 1850, which was constructed entirely of sod and so unpopular with soldiers that they called it Fort Sodom. In 1865, the military established Fort Dodge about two miles east, named after General Grenville Dodge, who reportedly considered the designation more of a complaint than a tribute, as his men had suffered through a brutal winter digging shelter into the bluffs.
The first civilian settler, rancher Henry Sitler, arrived in 1871 and built a sod house about five miles west of the fort. His home, located along the Santa Fe Trail, quickly became a popular stopping point for travelers and hunters. The following year, in June 1872, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge took command of Fort Dodge and allegedly banned the sale of alcohol on post property. Since the commander’s authority over trade ended at the fort’s boundary line, any entrepreneur could legally sell whiskey just outside that limit.
On June 17, 1872, a 24-year-old Canadian named George Hoover set up a whiskey tent exactly five miles and one step west of the fort, selling drinks at a quarter each. That tent would go down in history as the first business in what would become Dodge City, and Hoover would later become the town’s first elected mayor and one of its wealthiest citizens. Later that August, a group of businessmen and army officers organized a town company, a frontier real estate venture that laid claim to land and carved it into streets and lots. The town was initially named Buffalo City, but since Kansas already had a town by that name, the founders renamed it Dodge City after the military post.
What separated Dodge from other frontier settlements was timing: the founders knew exactly where the railroad was headed. When the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe tracks arrived in September 1872, Dodge City was transformed almost overnight into the hide capital of the world. Buffalo hunters shipped out over 850,000 hides in the first three years alone, and later sold the bones at $68 a ton for use in fertilizer and fine China. Robert Wright, one of the town’s original founders, described the boom: “Hardly had the railroad reached there, long before a depot could be built, business began.
And such a business, dozens of cars a day were loaded with hides and meat, and dozens of carloads of grain, flour, and provisions arrived each day. I have been to several mining camps where rich strikes had been made, but I never saw any town to equal Dodge. ”
For roughly the first year after its founding, Dodge City had no official law enforcement. There were no sheriffs, judges, or town marshals.
When trouble arose, local business owners handled it themselves or hired hard cases given the title of marshal without any official authority. The first jailhouse was nothing more than a hole in the ground where drunks were lowered until they sobered up. It was during this period that Dodge earned its bloody reputation. The first known killing came on September 5, 1872, when a man named Jack Reynolds was shot dead by a railroad track layer after an argument.
A few weeks later, a gambler known only as Denver killed a man in the street for no reason other than to watch him kick. In November, another gambler named Matt Sullivan was accused of cheating at cards and, along with a companion, killed at least two of his attackers. About a month later, Sullivan himself was assassinated, most likely by that same companion. The exact death toll for that first year remains uncertain.
George Hoover claimed at least 15 killings, while Robert Wright insisted it was closer to 25, with “perhaps more than double that number wounded. ” Modern historians Robert Dykstra and JoAnn Manfra have verified 18 homicides between July 1872 and July 1873. For a town with a permanent population of around 300 people, that figure is staggering. By modern homicide rates per 100,000 residents, Dodge City’s rate was between 3,600 and 6,000, compared to roughly 15 in Chicago and the mid-40s in St.
Louis. The comparison is admittedly skewed by the tiny population, but it makes the point: in a camp that small, 18 murders a year meant everyone personally knew someone who had been shot. Conditions had become so bad by February 1873 that leading citizens formed a vigilance committee, which was effective for a time. But the vigilantes soon began abusing their power to settle personal scores.
The breaking point came in early June 1873, when a drunken mob murdered William Taylor, a Black man and personal servant to Colonel Richard Dodge, for essentially no reason. In retaliation, Dodge sent soldiers to arrest the vigilantes. Two days later, on June 5, the first election in Ford County was held, and Charlie Bassett, a co-owner of the saloon that would eventually become the Long Branch, was chosen as sheriff. The same ballot also gave the county a probate judge and a prosecutor.
For the first time, there was a real process: a sheriff to make arrests, an attorney to press charges, and a judge to hear cases. According to historian Robert D. Mendenhall, “These men, especially Bassett, would help end the uncontrolled mayhem that had raged in early Dodge. ” The killings did not stop completely, but the violence declined drastically.
Meanwhile, the buffalo industry that built Dodge was collapsing. By 1874, hunters had shot out the herds in western Kansas and were pushing south into the Texas panhandle, in violation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. In the spring of 1874, a party of hunters left Dodge for the old trading post of Adobe Walls, which was essentially a Dodge City outpost owned and stocked by the town’s businessmen, located over 150 miles deep into Comanche territory. On June 27, 1874, several hundred Comanche warriors attacked the post, defended by just 28 men and one woman.
The defenders held them off, thanks in part to a famous long-range shot by hunter and Dodge City resident Billy Dixon. The attack helped trigger the Red River War, which ended with the last of the Comanches being sent to the reservation. Within a few years, the great southern buffalo herds had been hunted to extinction, and with them went the foundation of Dodge’s economy. The town was saved by a tiny tick called Boophilus annulatus.
Texas longhorns carried the tick, which spread a disease known as Texas fever that was harmless to humans and to the longhorns themselves but deadly to northern cattle. As farmers in central Kansas grew angry about diseased herds trampling their land and killing their livestock, they pressured the state legislature to draw a quarantine line prohibiting Texas longhorns from entering areas east of the line. That line kept moving west, and by 1876, all the established cow towns were off limits. Dodge City, by process of elimination, became the queen of the cow towns.
A new route called the Great Western Trail carried millions of longhorns to the Dodge City stockyards over the next decade. Each herd brought along cowboys who had spent two to three months in the saddle, choking down dust and sleeping on the hard ground. By the time they reached Dodge, they were looking for a bath, a drink, and a woman. Most of the trouble they caused was not deadly: it was drunken teenagers galloping up and down the streets firing pistols, fistfights, and busted windows.
Since the cowboys were propping up the town’s entire economy after the buffalo were gone, the city came up with a compromise. They drew a line through the middle of town, physically marked by the railroad tracks. North of the tracks was the respectable side, with no guns and no nonsense. South of the tracks, where most of the saloons and brothels were, people could do pretty much as they pleased as long as they did not kill anyone.
During the next few years, Dodge City employed just about every famous lawman of the era, including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Bill Tilghman. The cycle of job swapping was dizzying. Charlie Bassett served as county sheriff for four and a half years, then hired Bat Masterson as his undersheriff. In November 1877, Bat won the election for sheriff, and Bassett took Masterson’s former position as undersheriff.
Bat’s older brother Ed was city marshal, and Bassett also served as his assistant. When Ed was killed in the line of duty, Bassett took over as marshal and hired Wyatt Earp to fill his old spot. As legendary as these men became, they were not getting into nearly as many gunfights as the popular image suggests. More often than not, they simply cracked drunks over the head with their pistols and dragged them off to jail.
Some confrontations did turn deadly. On April 9, 1878, Ed Masterson tried to disarm a drunk named Jack Wagner. The two wrestled over the pistol, and Wagner shot Ed at point-blank range. Ed staggered about 200 yards to Hoover’s saloon before dropping dead.
That October, Dora Hand, the most beloved entertainer in Dodge, was shot to death in her sleep. The bullets were not meant for her. They were meant for Mayor James Kelly, who had recently beaten a spoiled young Texan named Spike Kennedy. Kennedy, rather than accept the beating, rode to Kelly’s home in the middle of the night and opened fire, unaware that Kelly was out of town and that Dora was staying there.
The posse that rode after Kennedy included Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman. They caught up to him near Meade City, shot his horse out from under him, and took him into custody. Less than six months later came one of the town’s most famous gunfights, at the Long Branch Saloon. On the night of April 5, 1879, gambler Levi Richardson walked in looking for another gambler, Frank Loving, who was known as Cock-Eyed Frank.
Loving had accused Richardson of making advances on his wife, and the two may have already come to blows. Richardson took a seat across from Loving, and they began arguing. Richardson said, “You wouldn’t fight anything, you damn son of a bitch. ” Loving calmly replied, “Try me and see.
” Both men jumped to their feet and started shooting. When it was over, Richardson was dead, and Loving walked away with nothing but a graze. His luck would not hold, however. A little over three years later, he was killed in Colorado by another gambler named John Allen.
After Allen was acquitted, he returned to Dodge City as a preacher. Other legends who walked the streets of Dodge included Luke Short, J. J. Webb, Charlie Siringo, and Doc Holliday, who spent part of the summer of 1878 there, pulling teeth by day and playing cards by night.
Most of these men were not yet famous. Earp was still three years away from the gunfight at the O. K. Corral, and Holliday was just a sickly dentist who liked to gamble.
By the early 1880s, they had scattered. They returned in the spring of 1883 in support of their old friend Luke Short, who had bought a half interest in the Long Branch Saloon, a direct competitor to the Alamo Saloon owned by former mayor A. B. Webster.
According to historian Mark Lee Gardner, in April 1883, following a heated city election, Dodge’s new city council passed two ordinances aimed at eliminating prostitution. The problem was that the ordinances were not enforced equally. Three of Short’s singers were promptly arrested, while the singers at his competitor’s saloon next door were ignored by the police. Short, rather than back down, called in his friends, including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, and eventually secured the backing of other hard cases like Doc Holliday and Texas Jack Vermillion.
The so-called Dodge City War, however, was settled without a single shot fired. The threat of so many deadly men converging on the town was enough to make city officials reconsider their position. The violence was not entirely over. The following summer, Mysterious Dave Mather and Tom Nixon, who ran competing saloons, began butting heads, possibly over a rumor that Mather was involved with Nixon’s wife.
On the night of July 18, 1884, Nixon opened fire on Mather as he stood in the street outside his saloon and missed. Three nights later, Mather walked up to Nixon and shot him dead. According to the July 22, 1884 edition of the Globe Livestock Journal, Mather “called to Nixon, who was standing on the corner, and as Nixon turned around, Mather commenced shooting at him, firing four shots, killing him instantly. ” A couple of years later, Mather himself went missing under mysterious circumstances.
By that point, the party was nearly over. The quarantine line that had protected Dodge’s cattle business never stopped moving. Farmers kept settling westward, and in 1885, the Kansas legislature extended the quarantine across the entire state, banning Texas cattle altogether. The brutal winter of 1885 and 1886 then wreaked havoc across the Great Plains, part of a string of die-offs that gutted the cattle industry.
The Santa Fe Trail had been obsolete for years, the buffalo were gone, and with the Indian Wars ending, the army no longer needed Fort Dodge. In the span of just over a decade, everything that had built Dodge’s economy, the buffalo hunters, the soldiers, the cowboys, had dried up. The legend, however, would not go anywhere. Books, movies, television shows like Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, and even Wyatt Earp comic books kept Dodge City alive in the public imagination.
The real Dodge City took full advantage. Today, the town features a replica of Front Street for tourists and holds mock shootouts daily during the summer, along with a replica of the Long Branch just a few blocks from the original. So was Dodge City really the wickedest little city in America? Yes, but only for about a year, back when it was a lawless buffalo camp, roughly from the summer of 1872 to the summer of 1873.
The Dodge City that most people picture, with the cowboys and Wyatt Earp and the Long Branch, was not really all that bad. From 1876 to 1885, the town experienced only 15 homicides, an average of about one and a half per year.
