Playing Tourist in Dodge City, KS

We elected to stop in Dodge City on our way to Colorado for the summer. It seemed like a good chance to see the sights and get some of the history of Dodge. One of the first things we did was to take a tour on the trolley through the historic areas of the town so we could be oreintated properly.

As you can see from the above photo, we got to the main area of Front Street just in time for the shootout! The men did a good job of it and when they started shooting the babies and young children began crying!

Above is a view of Front street just prior to the gun fight. These stores have a lot of historic information in them as well as an informative museum along the entire street. One of the museums has over 200 period firearms in it. There are others that depict the buffalo hunts and growth of the area as well as the arrival of the Texas longhorns.
Here the adversaries are "Pumpin' the Lead"!
The house above is called the Home of Stone. It was built in 1879- 1880 for the John Mueller family. John Mueller came to Dodge to open a bootmaking shop and parlayed that into three cattle ranches.

The construction of the house was done by a German stonemason out of stone quarried 12 miles north of Dodge. They drilled a series of holes and poured water into the holes. When the water froze it split the rock and they had a stone the size that they wanted and all they had to do was to surface it to get rid of the ridges.

In 1886 there was a terrible blizzard that wiped out the entire cattle herds in the area. This brought the Mueller fortune to disaster and the house was sold to Adam Schmidt for his family. The Schmidt family lived in the house until 1965 when it was sold to the county to be preserved. It is in excellant shape and a wonderful place to visit.

During the Trolley tour of Dodge we were taken to this area to show the feed lots for the fattening of the cattle for the processors in the area. As you can see the feed lot stretches to the horizon! There are a number of processers in the area, the largest of which process 6,000 head of cattle a day and one that does 4,600 per day! That is a lot of beef!