A Wild West experience
Dodge City has plenty to see and do, and a rich historical background
We left the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and headed east over the gorgeous La Veta pass to the town of Walsenburg. This small town at the edge of the Sangre De Cristo mountain range was the home to Robert Ford. He is the person apparently responsible for shooting Jessie James.
We travelled on and two days later wound up in Dodge City, Kansas. The area was first opened as Fort Dodge in 1865 to protect the settlers coming west. The town was later founded on the Santa Fe Trail in 1872. With the coming of the railroad in the same year, the town served as the shipping centre for the west.
Between 1872 and 1874, 850,000 buffalo hides were shipped to the east for tanning. Then cattle shipping took over and between 1875 and 1876, a record five million cattle were driven from Texas to Dodge City and shipped out. The rails stopped here and settlers continued on by wagon train over the Santa Fe Trail.
A thriving centre
The city has continued to thrive as a cattle shipping and tourism centre. We toured the famous Boot Hill Cemetery and museum. This museum displays many of the original guns used by the notorious gangsters and lawmen who tamed them. A replica town has been built on the original Boot Hill site. Regular skits and gunfights show spectators how the west really was and how it was tamed. Legendary lawmen such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Bat Masterson and others dedicated their lives to making the streets of Dodge a safer place to live. This museum and show are a must-see.
The visitors centre is a wealth of information on what to see and do while in Dodge. A man named Fred Harvey brought great service, good food and a measure of cultural refinement to the west through his chain of hotels and restaurants. Today, the historic and grand Santa Fe Railroad building has been restored and is used as a train station, the Depot Theatre Company and Santa Fe Depot.
We were treated to a tour of this building where we saw the painstaking restoration that has been done to bring the building to its original condition. Mr. Harvey had his hotel and restaurants here. He brought in young ladies of refinement and culture to serve the dinner guests. After the shipping of cattle slowed, the city became a peaceful place to live and raise a family. Many of the streets are paved with the original brick that was laid in 1872. To learn more about Dodge City go to the website.
RV Meandering
Betty and Dwayne Brandly started RVing shortly after they got married in 1965. Dwayne built a homemade tent trailer and off they went. That lasted until the kids were crawling around with sticky poplar seed pods clinging to their diapers; they looked like small porcupines. Betty said, "go and get a real trailer with a bathroom." Over the last 45 years they have gone to Disneyland, numerous places in Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan, and many of the northern US states. They have travelled for both work and pleasure, and Dwayne’s love for fishing has taken them into some backwoods places a trailer should not really have gone. Many trips were made to Craven, Saskatchewan to take in the original Big Valley country music festival. Now that they are both retired they are taking a leisurely trip for the next couple of months, just to see where the road takes them. These weekly updates will tell us where they have been.
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