Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Somewhere during the seventy miles between Great Bend and Dodge City you leave the
Midwest and enter the West. The people in the towns along the way stop wearing base-
ball caps and shuffling along with that amiable dopeyness characteristic of the Midwest
and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking
vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute.
People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.*
(*Many people will tell you that you mustn't call them buffalo, that they are really bison.
Buffalo, thesepeople will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and
are a different breed of animal altogether. These are the some people who tell you that
you must call geraniums pelargoniums. Ignore them.). Once there were 70 million buffalo
on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are
just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable
depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must
have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895,
therewereonly800buffaloleft,mostlyinzoosandtouringWildWestshows.Withnobuf-
falo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced
the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.
Nowadays,thankgoodness,bothhavemadearecovery.Todaythereare30,000buffaloand
300,000 Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners
have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There
you have a capsule history of the West.
Whentheyweren'tshootingthings,thepeopleoftheWestwentintotownslikeDodgeCity
for a little social and sexual intercourse. At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town
and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women
that only a cowboy could find attractive. But it was never as tough and dangerous as you
were led to believe on “Gunsmoke” and all those movies about Bat Masterson and Wyatt
Earp. For ten years it was the biggest cattle market in the world; that's all.
Inallthoseyears,therewereonlythirty-fourpeopleburiedinBootHillCemeteryandmost
of those were just drifters found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for
a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighboring “Historic Front
Street,” which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town
and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs. Matt Dillon never existed, I was dis-
tressed to learn, though Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were both real enough. Bat Master-
son ended his life as sports editor of the New York Morning Telegraph. Isn't that interest-
ing? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've
