Marathon Pundit: My Kansas Kronikles: Dodge City, Beef Kingdom

After leaving Greensburg, I drove northeast to historic Dodge City. Dodge City got its start in the 1870s as a Wild West "Cowtown." Cowboys from Texas drove cattle from Texas to the strategically located town near both the Santa Fe and Great Western trails, the Santa Fe Railroad, and the Arkansas River.

During its infamous heyday, men who were months removed from alcohol, gambling, and women came to Dodge City--with predictable results. Saloons with gambling and brothels opened up, and many men who didn't leave with their hard-earned wages "transferred" to shrewder individuals paid a higher price--their lives.

On the right is the reconstructed Front Street, a faitfully rebuilt version of the Dodge City's main street that lawmakers like Bat Masterson once patrolled. I arrived at the complex a little bit after 5:00pm, and many of the buildings shown have operating businesses. Some had closed shop for the day, however. Each summer night there is a reeneactment of a gunmen's showdown, which I missed.

Maybe I came at the wrong time, but Front Street was a big disappointment.

There is a pretty good Boot Hill Museum that tells the story of Dodge City from the Plains Indian days until Dodge City's second life, as a Western icon celebrated in movies and television shows such as Gunsmoke. Like the one in Tombstone, Arizona, Boot Hill is where many men who "died with their boots on" were buried. But almost as soon as it opened, the cemetery was closed, and the bodies moved to a proper cemetery. The gravemarker on the left is a re-creation.

But Dodge City has a third life. A beef processing center. Entering the town from nearby Fort Dodge, drivers see a massive slaughterhouse operated by National Beef. Surrounding the plant are feed lots. A feed lot, many of them can be found in more remote parts of western Kansas, is the final stop for cows where they are fattened up before their journey to the avatoir.

Dodge City, along with fellow southwestern Kansas towns Liberal and Garden City, comprise what I called Kansas's Beef Kingdoms.

Just as with the long-closed Chicago Stockyards, immigrants comprise the majority of the workers at contemporary slaughterhouses. Most of the people working at the Kansas plants are Hispanic, and depending on your source, or your interpretation of the data, Hispanics make up at least one-third, and possibly over 40 percent of the population of the Beef Kingdoms, including of course Dodge City.

If your view of Kansas is a bunch of white people with pockets of blacks near Kansas City, your view needs to be revised.

Related Kansas posts:

My Kansas Kronikles: An overview
My Kansas Kronikles: Chase County Courthouse
My Kansas Kronikles: Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church
My Kansas Kronikles: This has to stop
My Kansas Kronikles: The Sunflower State
My Kansas Kronikles: The Flint Hills
My Kansas Kronikles: Alan Clark's filling station in Eskridge
My Kansas Kronikles: A taste of home
My Kansas Kronikles: Kingman
My Kansas Kronikles: Western Holiday Motel in Wichita
My Kansas Kronikles: The Prairie Chicken Capital of the World

Technorati tags: