Although the trail is nearly two hundred years old the scarring of the earth in this
area was so severe that there are still tracks visible in this low, often marshy ground.
The scarring is more visible in person, but it is difficult to see in this photo.
Dodge City, Kansas, a re-created attraction that offers all of the
stores along a historic Dodge City Main Street, to include the Long Branch Saloon....
. . . which still serves beer to those so inclined. I had one.
Boot Hill was also re-created.
Day thirty one. All is well. Overnight Wichita, Kansas.
" . . . and for three hours the Arkansas was filled with the buffalo, crossing so fast that they could not stop to drink, they should be overwhelmed by the crowd thronging behind." Matt Hill from On The Santa Fe Trail, a collection of Matt Hill's journal entries from his 1839 trip along the Santa Fe Trail.
Some estimates place the total number of buffalo in North America in 1800 at 70 Million. One herd just south of Dodge City, Kansas was estimated at 4 million. By 1890 there were less than 1,000 buffalo left.
As I traveled today and yesterday, across the great grasslands of plains of Colorado and Kansas it was/is easy to see how this extensive land with the prairie grasses that covered it at that time could support the numbers estimated. For many hundreds of miles, just in these two states alone, there were/are expansive grass lands.
As I traveled further east the amount of cultivation along the route increased, and the dry, brown grasses became less brown, and finally green, and trees began to appear more naturally. Irrigation is still necessary for much of the crop land. Sorghum is a major crop, and more abundant as the greening commenced, to feed the thousands upon thousands of cattle being "feed out" at the hundreds of feed lots across southeastern Colorado and Kansas.
Yesterday and today as I traveled in the open air on the bike, getting all of the smells up close and personal, I thought of a story attributed to a Texas rancher, that someone asked him, "What is that smell?". In response the rancher took a prolonged and deep breath and said, "That is the smell of money". Feed lots. There are thousands of cattle in these numerous lots across southeastern Colorado and much of Kansas. The smell of cattle feed lots permeates the air, and is stronger in areas where there are larger or numerous feed lots. The whole of the downtown area where I stayed last night in Lamar, Colorado had that smell. The name of the hotel was fittingly called The Cow Palace.
Dodge City, Kansas (pop. 27,340) is a city of legend and lore, made so in part by books, movies, and of course TV. Marshall Matt Dillon, Doc Adams, and Miss Kitty existed only on TV, but Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and other lesser names often attracted national media attention for their exploits, embellished by the writers of dime novels which were popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the later 1800's Dodge City was a frontier town, complete with cowboys with six guns, where the saloons were wide open saloons. It was geographically located to attract a wide range of colorful individuals, and it did.
Wyatt Earp Boulevard is Dodge City's main thoroughfare, running right through the middle of town. Dodge City is a modern small town, with the conveniences expected in a city of its size. It is still a railroad town that traces its growth to the railroad center of its early days and the Santa Fe trail before that.
There was too much to see for the limited time I set aside to be there.
Another good day.
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