One of the most notorious places on the Wild West frontier, Dodge City (pop. 26,176) can be something of a disappointment if you come here looking for a rip-roaring frontier town. In its heyday, which lasted roughly from 1872, when the railroad arrived, to 1884, when the cattle drives were effectively banned, Dodge City was the undisputed capital of the buffalo-hunting, cattle-driving Wild West, with as many as 100 million bison hides and seven million head of cattle shipped out from here in that decade alone. At the same time, Dodge City was known as “Hell on the Plains,” famous for its gunfights and general lawlessness, despite marshals like Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp keeping order and planting bad guys in the Boot Hill cemetery above town.
However, almost nothing in Dodge City survives from that era. Boot Hill, for example, was bought by the city and is now the site of a small office building. (A statue of a cowboy, erected in 1927, says somewhat mournfully: “On the ashes of my campfire this city is built.”) Most of what you see in Dodge City dates from the 1920s at the earliest, and Dodge City is by and large a busy farming and cattle-ranching community, with extensive stockyards surrounding the small downtown area. Because of the low-profit economics of the beef industry, most of the 4,000–5,000 people who work in the feedlots and slaughterhouses today are immigrant workers from Mexico—which explains the predominance of Mexican cafés and grocery stores around town.
For travelers, there’s little here apart from one of the Midwest’s more heavily-hyped tourist attractions, the fake but fun Boot Hill Museum (daily; $8; 620/227-8188) and its re-created Front Street, where actors stage gunfights and “medicine shows” throughout the day. There’s also an evening burlesque show, featuring “Miss Kitty and her Can Can Girls;” a reconstructed sod house; the old (circa-1865) jail; and a one-room schoolhouse. A historic Santa Fe locomotive completes the Boot Hill collection; not surprisingly, Boot Hill is hard to miss, well-marked on the west side of town, just north of the railroad tracks along Wyatt Earp Boulevard (US-50/56), the main route through town.
Wyatt Earp Boulevard (US-50) holds most of Dodge City’s eating options, like the Hitch ’n Post truck stop at the east end of town, along with a half dozen motels.
