Friday April 8, 2022

I said goodbye to Route 50 today during my 168 mile (270  km) drive to Wichita, Kansas but not before I had learned a lot about Dodge City by visiting their Boot Hill Museum.

Dodge City is well known for its western heritage, which includes such figures as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday, and I was a little concerned that the museum might be touristy and solely focus on that but I was pleasantly surprised to find that, although most of the exhibits were of that era, the museum also had exhibits on the way of life of Native American tribes that predated that time and the development of the modern city.

The museum’s modern building has indoor exhibits describing the entire history of the area and there are also outdoor exhibits consisting of replica and original buildings from the 1870s up to the 1950s. They offer a realistic account of the unfortunate aspects of the success of Dodge City, including the near extinction of the buffalo herds due to over hunting and the destruction of nomadic Native American life and culture. Dodge City was the center of the buffalo trade as well as a major cow town.

As I mentioned yesterday, Route 50 follows the Santa Fe Trail used by pioneers to settle the American west. This is an original supply wagon from the 1860s used on the trail before the construction of the railroad.

This is a replica, built in 1958, of Front Street, the main drag, as it was in the 1870s. All of the buildings are open and contain various displays of life and professions at the time.

The doctor’s office display. Each exhibit had an information board stating the people and dates represented.

Some buildings are original and have been moved to the museum location.

This is Boot Hill Cemetery. Boot Hill was the highest point in town but, as you can see, is not large. It was only used as a cemetery for about a year.

Above the barber shop you can see a modern indicator of the challenge of life here – the tornado siren.

I spent about three hours looking around the museum but then, of course, it was time to “Get out of Dodge”. The phrase is not historical but became popular after the TV series “Gunsmoke”, which ran from 1955 to 1975, aired. The fictional marshal, Matt Dillon, often told gunslingers to do this.