Guide Exploring Dodge City, Kansas | SolarTravels.com

<body> Destination Guides Search for a City Destination Guides > North America > USA > Great Plains > Kansas > West through Kansas > Dodge City Dodge City Travel Options Flights Hotels Vacation Rentals Cars • Dodge City · The Town • Practicalities • Hotels in Dodge City DODGE CITY BE THERE NOW Hotels in Dodge City • Silver Spur Travelodge Dodge City from $59.00 USD • Comfort Inn Dodge City Dodge City from $83.66 USD • Silver Spur Travelodge Dodge City from $59.00 USD More Hotels in Dodge City >> READ IT HERE DODGE CITY , 150 miles west of Wichita, is perhaps the most famous of all America's cowtowns. It has certainly been committed to celluloid more times than any other, especially in 1930s Westerns like My Darling Clementine and Dodge City . However, this wildest of Wild West cities had a heyday of only a decade, from 1875 until 1886. Established in 1872 with the Santa Fe Railroad, which transported the hides of millions of plains buffalo, by 1875 the town of traders, trappers and hunters had to find a new economic base - the buffalo had been exterminated. The era of the great cattle drives was already underway, and Dodge City became a den of iniquity where gambling, drinking and general lawlessness were the norm. Such wickedness led to gunfights galore, and the notorious Boot Hill cemetery (where the villains were buried with their boots on) was kept busy by charismatic lawmen such as Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. The Town Dodge City today is rather more staid, with its old downtown area enveloped by a hinterland of railroad tracks and giant silos. Outside of the two-week Dodge City Days and Rodeo ( ), held near the end of July, it is content to... Dodge City today is rather more staid, with its old downtown area enveloped by a hinterland of railroad tracks and giant silos. Outside of the two-week Dodge City Days and Rodeo ( ), held near the end of July, it is content to replay its movie image in the Boot Hill Museum , 500 Wyatt Earp Blvd (June-Aug daily 8am-8pm; Sept-May Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $7, $18 family ticket, covering admission only). The museum centers on the single-sided Historic Front Street , which was constructed in 1958 and has been acquiring old buildings from all over the West ever since. There's a bank and a grocer, stagecoach rides, a funeral parlor, a smithy, and even a full-sized railroad station, as well as the Long Branch Saloon , scene of a variety show with cancan dancers every night at 7.30pm ($6). Gunfights and showdowns break out with alarming regularity. Boot Hill cemetery itself is higher up the hill, still on museum grounds; there's just a sorry little patch of lawn on one corner of the original site, which was in any case abandoned in 1879 after just six years and thirty-four burials. The bodies were reinterred elsewhere, and as the graves were never marked in the first place, the jokey wooden crosses in the cemetery are more than a little bogus. Other sights in town include the Home of Stone , 112 E Vine St (June-Aug Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 2-4pm; free), an emotive memorial to pioneer mothers, often forgotten amid the macho Wild West myth-making. The house looks pretty much as it would have when built in 1881, with domestic memorabilia that belonged to early plainswomen. El Capitan , at Second Street and Wyatt Earp Boulevard, is a massive bronze longhorn, facing south towards an identical north-facing statue in Abilene, West Texas. Together they mark the beginning and the end of the cattle drives. </body>