Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West

Robert R. Dykstra, JoAnn Manfra

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624768, 9780700624751
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624775
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Raised on Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, we know what it means to “get outta Dodge”—to make a hasty escape from a dangerous place, like the Dodge City of Wild West lore. But why, of all the notorious, violent cities of old, did Dodge win this distinction? And what does this tenacious cultural metaphor have to do with the real Dodge City?

In a book as much about the making of cultural myths as it is about Dodge City itself, authors Robert Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra take us back into the history of Dodge to trace the growth of the city and its legend side-by-side. An exploration of murder statistics, court cases, and contemporary accounts reveals the historical Dodge to be neither as violent nor as lawless as legend has it—but every bit as intriguing. In a style that captures the charm and chicanery of storytelling in the Old West, Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West finds a culprit in a local attorney, Harry Gryden, who fed sensational accounts to the national media during the so-called “Dodge City War” of 1883. Once launched, the legend leads the authors through the cultural landscape of twentieth-century America, as Dodge City became a useful metaphor in more and more television series and movies. Meanwhile, back in the actual Dodge, struggling on a lost frontier, a mirror image of the mythical city began to emerge, as residents increasingly embraced tourism as an economic necessity.

Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West maps a metaphor for belligerent individualism and social freedom through the cultural imagination, from a historical starting point to its mythical reflection. In this, the book restores both the reality of Dodge and its legend to their rightful place in the continuum of American culture.

1

PIONEERS

When Dodge City came to life in the summer of 1872 an expatriate Pennsylvanian named Henry Sitler, as his biography put it, “owned the ground where it now stands.” Within the decade Sitler would see his modest corner of the world ascend to international celebrity or, perhaps better, international notoriety.¹

Until his mid-twenties Henry still lived at home, helping out on the family’s prospering Pennsylvania stock farm that produced feed grain, butter, and beef, and, like his father before him, working as a carpenter. Unlike his father, who labored some twenty years at his craft to earn enough to buy the Sitler place, the son enjoyed better local prospects. The very week Henry turned twenty-two the nation’s first drilled oil well at Titusville, thirty miles east of the farm, began bringing up quality black crude. The oil extraction and refining business touched off a local building boom that led to unprecedented wages for construction work.²

But the outbreak of the Civil War disrupted whatever immediate future Henry may have anticipated. Late in 1861, six months after the firing on Fort Sumter, Sitler and his brother enlisted in the 2d Pennsylvania Cavalry. An enrolling officer jotted down Henry’s particulars: age twenty-four, height almost five feet seven inches, complexion light, hair dark, eyes brown. Henry was made a regimental bugler, a position of some responsibility that carried with it promotion to noncommissioned officer.³

Sergeant Sitler survived almost three years’ soldiering before falling into enemy hands during a fighting retreat at the battle of Samaria Church southeast of Richmond, Virginia. Not long afterward he stepped down from a railroad boxcar and faced the Civil War’s ultimate horror: the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. The stockaded enclosure hit its peak population of around 33,000 POWs when Sitler arrived in late June 1864. That August alone nearly 10 percent of them died from confinement in this open-air sewer crowded with makeshift tents and lean-tos shrouded in woodsmoke, where sight-seers gawked from stockade platforms as Yankees in their multitudes died of illness, malnutrition, exposure, and what record keepers recorded as “nostalgia,” a sad euphemism for lethal despair.⁴

Released in a prisoner exchange after five hazardous months in captivity, Sitler spent Christmas 1864 at home on leave, then waited out the lengthy processing of his discharge at a transition camp near Philadelphia. Here, not yet fully recuperated from his imprisonment, he spent two weeks in the hospital, being treated for acute constipation and ecthyma, an ulcerating skin disease. In March 1865 the army finally turned him loose with $100 unused clothing allowance in his pocket.⁵

Although prepared to resume his trade as a carpenter, Sitler ultimately chose not to stay in northwest Pennsylvania. A two-week delay in a project he had signed on for at Meadville prompted him to indulge in a quick trip (about two days by rail) to see a brother in Illinois. “On that visit,” it was later said of Sitler, “he became inflicted with the western fever.” Instead of returning home he lit out for the trans-Mississippi frontier.⁶

Henry Sitler ended up at the edge of the High Plains, a region long in contention among native peoples of diverse cultures and languages. In the 1400s, at the close of a centuries-long drought and consequent depopulation, successive waves of tribal migrants began drifting into the area from ancient homelands. The Apache peoples established permanent villages at the headwaters of the Arkansas River in what is now Colorado. The Comanches, having followed the Rocky Mountain foothills southward, arrived in the 1820s on the upper Arkansas and systematically destroyed the Apache settlements. Although by 1780 mounted Comanche hunters, raiders, and traders dominated the Plains from Kansas to southern Texas, on their northern flank the Kiowas, then the Plains Apaches (distant cousins of the early inhabitants), then the linguistically related Arapahos and Cheyennes drifted in from the Dakotas.

By the 1830s intertribal war raged along the Arkansas River, finally exhausting all combatants. In 1840 Arapaho and Apache intermediaries brokered a cease-fire among the five tribes that informally ceded the Plains above the Arkansas River to the Arapahos and Cheyennes, with the Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches sharing control over everything to the south.⁷

Already by 1821 heavily armed Saint Louis trading caravans had laid out the storied Santa Fe Trail, which cut across southern Kansas on its way to New Mexico. After thirty years of small-scale raids and retaliations, all affected Indian groups, in return for a shared federal payment of $18,000 a year for ten years, formally promised to stop impeding commerce on the trail. But in 1856 war between the Cheyennes and the US Army broke out in Wyoming. Then the Pike’s Peak gold rush in Colorado engulfed the Arapahos. In 1864 the Kiowas and Plains Apaches joined the Cheyennes and Arapahos in closing off the Santa Fe Trail, and the violence spread eastward to the Kansas settlements.⁸

So it was that when Sitler staked a claim in the lower Solomon River valley of central Kansas the region had been hastily evacuated by the fear of raids. Undaunted, Henry broke sod and raised a crop. But, as he later said of his own pioneering innocence, “The country was a complete wild prairie, and not a railroad was then in operation in the State of Kansas; farming was therefore a slow way of making a fortune.” He retreated to Topeka, where the new state capitol was under construction and work plentiful.

In 1867, as the Indian war subsided and the Kansas Pacific Railway snaked up the Smoky Hill River valley heading for a newly relocated army post at Ellsworth, Sitler responded to the call of the quartermaster for some 300 “mechanics and laborers” to finish building Fort Harker. As soon as that military project was up and running in January 1867, Sitler and others progressed further along the rail line to Hays City, where another relocated army post offered skilled employment.

Just as Fort Hays reopened for business in the summer of 1867 the Indian war flared up again, requiring a different kind of well-paid work for men willing to face the danger. Sitler, crediting “a chance job at driving a team of ‘shave tails’ [second lieutenants] to Fort Dodge,” joined a rag-tag procession of teamsters freighting military supplies down to that solitary post in 1868. Here one of Henry’s old corps commanders, General Philip Sheridan, was organizing an area defense of the southwestern Kansas frontier.⁹

Fort Dodge had been laid out well beyond the line of population advance in the closing days of the Civil War. The compound stood on the site of an old Santa Fe Trail campground, fronting the meandering, low-banked Arkansas River (pronounced by Kansans, then as now, the Ar-kan-sas River). Embroidered with quicksands and potholes, the quarter-mile-wide flow proved especially treacherous each spring as Rocky Mountain snowmelt briefly sent the river boiling eastward. Civilian employees constructed log-roofed dugouts along its bank for their quarters, keeping a wary eye out for flooding.¹⁰

When in 1869 the army’s defeat of the Cheyenne Dog Soldier faction brought another cease-fire that would last until 1874, Sitler spent the next several years hauling goods, at ninety cents per hundredweight, from the railroad at Hays City down to Fort Dodge and from there to army detachments policing the Texas Panhandle and Indian Territory. As he later recalled, he also secured military contracts, bidding successfully on various short-term and lucrative quarrying, lumbering, hay-cutting, and construction jobs. On one contract alone, probably in 1869, he earned $1,020 (around $16,728 in 2015 currency) supplying the fort with sixty cords of wood at $17 a cord. After hostilities resumed the work proved hazardous. When supervising the harvest of a hay crop Sitler took an Indian bullet in the leg, resulting in a bad wound that required hospitalization at Fort Dodge and postponement of marriage to Emma Harper of Pennyslvania. The two finally married in 1875 in Kansas City.¹¹

While working his government contracts Sitler nurtured plans for making it big in cattle raising, figuring that once the buffalo had been swept from the region by over-hunting and the Plains tribes had been sequestered on Indian Territory reservations, it would be prime grazing country.

Wanting to keep his day jobs, Henry decided to stake a land claim as close as possible to the fort’s compound. An irregular 43,000-acre military reservation surrounded Fort Dodge, established to preserve its timber, stone, and hay for government use. The tip of the reservation’s western panhandle ended at the Arkansas River five miles from the fort complex. At this intersection Henry for a second time became a squatter, preempting, as allowed by federal law, 160 acres of land. In 1871 he built a three-room sod house and released a few head of cattle, signaling his intent to apply to the US land office at Wichita for formal possession of his quarter-section of riverside pasture.¹²

In his capsule biography Sitler implied that his remembered “five months and twenty days” in unspeakably crowded rebel confinement still rankled. The immense sky and vast, empty surfaces of southwestern Kansas must have suited him. He stayed the rest of his life.¹³

Before long Sitler’s claim profited from two transforming developments.

In the spring of 1872 commercial buffalo hunting on the Great Plains expanded from a seasonal to a year-round enterprise. Although prime bison pelts had been an item of commerce for half a century, the market was limited to consumer goods (rugs, lap-robes, coats) made from skins harvested and processed by Plains Indians in winter when the animals’ fur was at its thickest. But eastern demand abruptly accelerated when in 1871 tanners developed new chemical processes for converting buffalo hides into tough, low-cost belting for transmitting energy from one factory machine to another.

Word promptly spread from eastern tanners to traveling hide buyers to western hunters that commercially valuable bison skins could be collected year round. One to two thousand well-armed groups of self-styled “buffalo runners” flocked west. Many ignored treaty restrictions on access to tribal lands and invaded Indian hunting grounds along the Arkansas River. That first season alone, based on the Sante Fe Railroad’s transportation of 165,721 bison hides in 1872 and Richard Dodge’s estimate that over a third of the buffalo killed that year proved unsalable due to improper skinning, roughly 250,000 bison died in Kansas and Colorado on both sides of the river from large-caliber gunshot wounds. The military at Fort Dodge and other posts looked the other way.¹⁴

Also in 1872 the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad began building southwestward through Kansas, roadbed graders ahead, track-layers spiking down iron rails over white oak ties ten days behind, advancing a mile per day. In mid-June the graders reached Hutchinson. From there the company’s right-of-way headed toward Fort Dodge. Then it cut diagonally across the military reservation, sidling up to the north b...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Gettin’ Outta Dodge
• 1. Pioneers
• 2. Year of Living Dangerously
• 3. Deadly Prose
• 4. Case Histories
• 5. Circle Dot Cowboys
• 6. Dodge City’s Sensations
• 7. End Games
• 8. Contesting Boot Hill
• Epilogue: Homicide, Moral Discourse, Cultural Identity
• Appendix: Homicide Victims, 1872–1886
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover