On the night of July 18th, 1884, Assistant Marshal Thomas Nixon stood on the corner of Front Street and First Avenue in Dodge City, Kansas, doing his duty. He had no reason to expect that his rival, a saloon keeper named Mysterious Dave Mather, would come downstairs from the Opera House and deliberately shoot him through. Nixon fired first, actually, opening on Mather as he stood in the street outside his saloon, but he missed. Three nights later, Mather walked up to Nixon and called to him.

As Nixon turned around, Mather commenced shooting, firing four shots, killing him instantly. The party was just about over, and Dodge City’s wild days were drawing to a close. But to understand how it all came to this, you have to go back further, long before the first whiskey tent ever went up on the prairie. Long before there was a Dodge City, there was the Santa Fe Trail.

First opened in 1821, it ran from Missouri all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in the decades that followed, thousands upon thousands of wagons rolled right past the spot where Dodge City would eventually stand. But people had been calling that country home for a very long time before any of that. Coronado passed through back in 1541, nearly three centuries before the Santa Fe Trail even existed, and the people he found living there were ancestors of the Wichita. After them came the Plains Apaches, and eventually the Kiowas and Comanches.

To give you an idea just how long the area had been occupied, a stone spear point was dug out of a creek bank about 100 miles north of Dodge, found sitting under the shoulder blade of an extinct species of bison. The bones were dated over 10,000 years old. The first white settlement in the vicinity of what would soon become Dodge City was a little outpost called Fort Mann, built by civilians in 1847 to protect travelers along the Santa Fe Trail. It only lasted about a year.

Between the poor conditions and the attacks from hostiles, the settlers closed up shop during the summer of 1848. The army showed up in 1850 and built another post, one they’d eventually name Fort Atkinson. But by 1853, they too had called it quits. Part of the problem was that the fort was built entirely out of sod, and conditions were so miserable that the soldiers took to calling it Fort Sod, and then later on Fort Sodom.

It wasn’t until 1865 that the army established a new post they called Fort Dodge, about two miles east of where Fort Atkinson had been. As to why exactly they called it Fort Dodge, it was most likely due to a general by the name of Grenville Dodge. Apparently, he had sent out the first command in the dead of winter, leaving the soldiers freezing and digging holes in the bluffs just to have somewhere to sleep. The way Grenville tells it, the name was more of a complaint than a tribute.

There are some who think it was named after another officer, Colonel Henry Dodge, who had led an expedition up the Arkansas River back in the 1830s. He and his men were definitely in the area, but there’s no actual evidence showing that the fort was named after him. Either way, the name would stick, and Fort Dodge would remain in operation all the way until 1882. For the first few years, the entire stretch of Kansas was pretty much nothing but soldiers, wagon trains, and buffalo.

Millions upon millions of buffalo. The first real settler didn’t show up until 1871, a rancher named Henry Sitler, who built himself a sod house about five miles west of the fort. He was initially just looking for a headquarters for his cattle operation, but seeing as how his new home sat right along the Santa Fe Trail, it soon became a popular stopping point for travelers and hunters. According to Sitler, if you stood on the hill just above his place, you could see traffic stretching along the Santa Fe Trail for as far as the eye could see, pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And then came the whiskey. In June of 1872, yet another Dodge, this one named Richard Irving Dodge, took command over at the fort. One of the very first things he did, at least the way the story has always been told, was to ban the sale of alcohol. Nobody has ever turned up the actual written order regarding this ban, but what happened next makes it very plausible.

Back in those days, whenever the government established a fort out west, they usually set aside a buffer of land surrounding it. In the case of Fort Dodge, the western edge of that buffer ran about five miles out from the fort. Inside that zone, the post commander was king. He decided who could trade there, who could sell there, even who could live there.

But his say-so over business dealings stopped at the boundary line. He and his soldiers could ride out and patrol pretty much wherever they pleased, but when it came to telling people what they could and couldn’t sell, the line was the limit. So if anyone wanted to peddle whiskey, all they had to do was set up shop exactly five miles and one step west of the fort. And as fate would have it, that’s exactly what a 24-year-old Canadian by the name of George Hoover ended up doing.

He showed up with a wagon load of whiskey on June 17th, 1872, exactly two weeks after Dodge took over command, and began selling drinks at a quarter a pop. His whiskey tent would go down in history as being the very first business in what would eventually become Dodge City. Hoover would even go on to become the town’s first elected mayor, in addition to one of its wealthiest citizens. Later that August, a group of businessmen, along with officers from Forts Dodge, Riley, and Leavenworth, organized what was known as a town company.

If you’ve never heard of a town company, imagine it as sort of a frontier real estate startup. A group of investors would lay claim to a chunk of land, hire a surveyor to carve it up into streets and lots, file the paperwork, and just like that, they had themselves a town, at least on paper. All that was left was to sell the lots one by one and pocket the difference. Dodge was initially named Buffalo City, for obvious reasons, but as it turned out, Kansas already had one of those, so they just renamed it Dodge City after the fort.

The thing that separated Dodge from just about every other frontier settlement was the timing. These guys weren’t guessing. They knew exactly where the railroad was headed. And sure enough, later that September, the shiny new tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe came rolling in from the east.

It was this arrival that changed everything. There was a massive demand for hides back east, and with the arrival of the railroad in 1872, Dodge City was transformed into the hide capital of the world almost overnight. By one count, over 850,000 buffalo hides were shipped out of Dodge in just the first three years alone. Something like a million and a half by the time the slaughter finally came to a halt.

And when the hides ran out, they just took to shipping the bones. Farmers would gather them off the prairie and sell them at $68 a ton for everything from fertilizer to fine China. According to one of Dodge’s original founders, a guy named Robert Wright, quote, “Hardly had the railroad reached there, long before a depot could be built, business began. And such a business, dozens of cars a day were loaded with hides and meat, and dozens of carloads of grain, flour, and provisions arrived each day.

I have been to several mining camps where rich strikes had been made, but I never saw any town to equal Dodge. ” End of quote. Dodge City was booming, to say the least. There was just one little problem.

For roughly the first year after its founding, they really didn’t have much in the way of law enforcement. No sheriffs or judges or town marshals or anything like that. When things got a little too far off the rails, the local business owners would just handle it themselves. And when that wasn’t enough, they hired hard cases who were given the title of marshal without any official authority.

Basically, just private muscle. Even the first jailhouse was nothing more than a hole in the ground where they’d lower the drunks till they sobered up. It was during that first year that Dodge earned its bloody reputation. The first known killing came on September 5th, 1872, when a man named Jack Reynolds got into it with one of the track layers for the railroad.

An argument that resulted in said track layer shooting Reynolds dead. Then, just a few weeks later, a gambler known simply as Denver killed a man right there in the streets for no other reason than just to watch him kick. And on and on it went. Later that November, another gambler named Matt Sullivan got accused of cheating at cards.

He went for his gun, and although sources do vary, he and his buddy are thought to have killed at least two of their assailants. Then about a month after that, Sullivan himself was assassinated, most likely by said buddy. As far as the official body count there in Dodge City, nobody can really say for certain exactly how many people were killed during the first year. George Hoover would claim no less than 15, but Robert Wright said it was closer to 25 with, quote, “Perhaps more than double that number wounded.

” Both of these guys were basically relying on decades-old memories. A more modern account, like the one from historians Robert Dykstra and JoAnn Manfra, puts it at 18 verified homicides between July of 1872 and July of 1873. Could the actual number be higher? Absolutely.

Dodge City didn’t have a newspaper yet, so it’s always possible that some of the killings could have gone undocumented. But 18 is what can be proven. That doesn’t sound like much, but for a town with a permanent population of just around 300, maybe 500 if you count everybody camped out on the edges, 18 killings in just one year is astronomical. To put that in perspective, using the same measurement we use nowadays, homicides per 100,000, Chicago closed out one of its safest years in decades at roughly 15 homicides per 100,000.

St. Louis, usually ranked as one of the deadliest big cities per capita in the United States, comes in somewhere around the mid-40s. But Dodge City during its first year, using these same exact metrics, had a homicide rate somewhere between 3,600 and 6,000 per 100,000. Is that a totally fair comparison?

Not really. When your entire town is made up of just around 300 people, every single killing sends that homicide rate straight through the roof. But that’s kind of the point. In a camp that small, 18 murders a year means that everybody in town personally knew somebody who got shot, probably several somebodies.

Things had gotten so bad by February of 1873 that the leading citizens formed a vigilance committee. Credit where credit’s due, they were effective, at least for a little while. But the vigilantes themselves soon went bad, as tends to happen, and they began abusing their power to settle personal scores. The breaking point came just a few months later in early June 1873, when a drunken mob murdered a black man by the name of William Taylor, shooting him dead for basically nothing.

Only thing is, Taylor also happened to be a personal servant for Richard Dodge. So in retaliation, Dodge sent in a patrol of soldiers to arrest the vigilantes. Then, just two days after that, on June 5th, came the very first election ever held in Ford County. The man they chose to sheriff was an old boy by the name of Charlie Bassett, one of the original co-owners of the famous Long Branch Saloon.

That same ballot gave Ford County both a probate judge and a prosecutor, which really did make a big difference when it came to law and order. Up until that point, there really wasn’t anybody who could swear out warrants or even file charges. There was a deputy US Marshal working nearby, a guy named Jack Bridges, but federal marshals dealt in federal crimes, stuff like mail theft and train robberies. A drunk buffalo hunter shooting up a dance hall wasn’t really his problem.

And even if he wanted to make it his problem, there wasn’t a local court to try him in. There wasn’t even a jailhouse. All they had was that hole in the ground. After the election, though, they actually had a process.

Sheriff to make the arrest, an attorney to press the charges, and even a judge to hear the cases. Per historian Robert D. Mendenhall, quote, “These men, especially Bassett, would help end the uncontrolled mayhem that had raged in early Dodge. ” End of quote.

Did the killings stop completely? No, they did not. There was a double homicide just a month later. Still, the violence did drastically decline, and a big part of that decline was due to finally having an official form of law enforcement.

As Dodge City was busy getting its act together, the industry that originally built the town was experiencing a problem of its own. They were running out of buffalo. By 1874, the hunters had already shot out all the herds there in western Kansas, and as a result, they began searching further and further south into the Texas panhandle. That was kind of sort of illegal per the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867.

Nevertheless, in the spring of 1874, a party of hunters left Dodge City bound for an old trading post known as Adobe Walls. There were actually two stores down at Adobe Walls buying up all the hides. One of them belonged to Robert Wright and his partner Charles Rath. The other was ran by A.

C. Myers, same merchant who organized the entire supply operation. And the man pouring drinks there at Adobe Walls was James Hanrahan, yet another Dodge City local, one of Ford County’s very first commissioners. Adobe Walls wasn’t just some random hunting camp.

It was essentially a Dodge City outpost, owned and stocked by Dodge City businessmen, over 150 miles deep into the land of the Comanche. And the Comanches most definitely took notice. They actually attacked the walls on June 27th of that same year. Just 28 men and one woman against several hundred of the finest warriors who had ever strung a bow.

Somehow, against all odds, they managed to hold them off, thanks in no small part to those big buffalo guns, as well as the long-range shot made by fellow hunter and Dodge City alumni Billy Dixon. Once word of the fight finally made it back to town, a relief party of around 50 men rode south to fetch the survivors. The guy leading that relief party was a buffalo hunter named Tom Nixon, a man who, just a decade later, would be shot dead right there on the streets of Dodge City by none other than Mysterious Dave Mather. The fight at Adobe Walls helped to kick off the Red River War, which ended with the last of the Comanches being sent to the reservation.

Then, just a few years after that, the great southern buffalo herds had pretty much been hunted to extinction. Dodge City’s economy, at least until that point, was based entirely on the hide business. The only thing stopping Dodge from becoming another ghost town following the decline of the buffalo was a little tick known as Boophilus annulatus. Ever since just after the Civil War, Texas ranchers had been driving herds of longhorn cattle north to the Kansas railheads.

First Abilene, and then to places like Newton, Ellsworth, and Wichita. Only problem was those Texas longhorns carried a nasty little passenger, a tick that spread a disease they called the Texas fever. The Texas fever did not affect humans, and it didn’t affect the longhorns who carried them, but it was a death sentence to the cattle that were already up in Kansas who hadn’t yet been exposed. As more and more farmers began settling in central Kansas, they weren’t all that happy about diseased herds trampling their fences and killing their milk cows.

So they pressured the state legislature into drawing a quarantine line across Kansas with no Texas longhorns allowed east of the line. And that line just kept moving west, so much so that by 1876, all the other established cow towns were already off limits. Basically, Dodge City became the queen of the cow towns through the process of elimination. A new route they called the Great Western Trail carried the herds straight up from Texas, and over the course of the next decade, millions of longhorns came funneling into the Dodge City stockyards.

This new development presented a problem of its own. Each and every one of those herds brought along at least a dozen or so cowboys. By the time they finally got to Dodge City, they’d been in the saddle for two to three months straight, just choking down dust and sleeping on the hard ground. Naturally, by the time they arrived, they were looking for a bath, a drink, and a woman, not necessarily in that order.

While the cowboys certainly did bring in a lot of money for the local businesses, they also brought in a whole lot of trouble, the same type of stuff that had already been happening further east in places like Abilene and Wichita. The majority of that trouble was not in the form of killing. Mostly, it was just a bunch of drunk teenagers galloping their horses up and down the street firing off their pistols. A lot of fistfights and busted windows, but not necessarily homicides.

Still, it was an issue, and it wasn’t something you could solve simply by chasing them out of town. It was the cowboys that were propping up Dodge’s entire economy, especially after the buffalo were gone. Rather than force them to leave, the city just came up with a compromise. They drew a line straight through the middle of town, and that line was actually the railroad tracks.

North of the tracks was the respectable side of town. No guns and no nonsense. But south of the tracks, where most of the saloons and brothels were, you could pretty much do as you pleased, as long as you didn’t kill anybody. Over the next few years, Dodge City would employ just about every big name you can think of.

Guys like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Bill Tilghman. These guys swapped badges so often it’d make you dizzy just trying to keep up. Charlie Bassett served as county sheriff for four and a half years, and then towards the end of his run, he hired Bat Masterson as his undersheriff. Skip ahead to November of 1877, and Bat won the election to sheriff.

At which point, Bassett took Masterson’s former position as undersheriff. They just traded jobs. Meanwhile, Bat’s older brother Ed was city marshal. And Bassett, in addition to being undersheriff, served as Ed’s assistant marshal.

And then when Ed was killed in the line of duty, Bassett took over as marshal. To fill his old spot as assistant marshal, he hired Wyatt Earp. As legendary as these guys were, they weren’t getting in anywhere near as many gunfights as you might think. More often than not, they just cracked the drunks upside the head with their pistols and dragged them off to jail.

A lot less paperwork that way, and usually everybody woke up the next morning. Sometimes, though, things did turn deadly. Like on April 9th, 1878, when Ed Masterson tried to disarm a drunk named Jack Wagner. The two of them got to wrestling over the pistol, and Wagner shot Ed at point-blank range.

He staggered about 200 or so yards over to Hoover’s saloon before dropping dead. Then there was a lady named Dora Hand, the most beloved entertainer in all of Dodge. In October of 1878, she was shot to death in her sleep. Only thing is, the bullets weren’t actually meant for her.

They were meant for the mayor, a guy by the name of James Kelly, who, in addition to his mayoral duties, had also recently beaten the hell out of a spoiled young Texan known as Spike Kennedy. Kennedy, rather than take his ass-whipping like a man, instead chose to ride up to Kelly’s place in the middle of the night and start shooting, sort of like an old West drive-by. What he wasn’t aware of, though, was that Kelly was out of town, and that Dora was staying there in his absence. That alone tells you what kind of place Dodge was back in the 1870s.

Even the mayor was getting in fistfights. As far as Kennedy, the posse that went after him consisted of guys like Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman, almost a who’s who of Old West gunmen. They rode Spike down over by Meade City, shot his horse out from underneath him, and took him into custody. One of the most famous gunfights would occur less than six months later, over at the Long Branch Saloon.

On the night of April 5th, 1879, a gambler named Levi Richardson walked in looking for another gambler known as Cock-Eyed Frank Loving. Apparently, Loving had accused Richardson of making advances on his wife. There are also stories that the two of them had already come to blows at least once. Richardson took a seat across from Loving, they predictably began arguing.

Finally, Richardson said, quote, “You wouldn’t fight anything, you damn son of a bitch. ” To which Loving calmly replied, “Try me and see. ” And that was all it took. Both of them jumped to their feet and started shooting.

Once it was over, Richardson was dead, and Loving walked away with nothing but a graze. His luck wouldn’t hold though. Little over three years later, he was killed in Colorado by yet another gambler named John Allen. And after Allen was acquitted, he returned to Dodge City as a preacher.

There were plenty of other legends who also walked the streets of Dodge City. Luke Short, J. J. Webb, Charlie Siringo.

Even Doc Holliday was there during the summer of 1878, pulling teeth by day and playing cards by night. That same year is also when Wyatt Earp allegedly had a confrontation with the notorious Clay Allison. Keep in mind that most of these guys weren’t even famous yet. Earp was still three years off from the OK Corral, and Holliday was just a sickly dentist who liked to gamble.

By the early 1880s, they had basically scattered to the wind. It wasn’t until the spring of 1883 that they came back to Dodge City, and they did so in support of their old friend, Luke Short. Luke had bought himself a half interest in the Long Branch Saloon, and the Long Branch happened to be a direct competitor with the Alamo Saloon, owned by the former mayor, A. B.

Webster. Per historian Mark Lee Gardner, quote, “In April, following a heated city election, Dodge’s new city council passed two ordinances aimed at eliminating prostitution. The problem arose when the ordinances weren’t enforced equally. Luke Short, who had migrated from Tombstone to Dodge City, co-owned the Long Branch Saloon and gambling hall, and three of his singers were promptly arrested.

Yet, the singers in the saloon of his competitor next door were ignored by the police. ” End of quote. In other words, they were basically trying to run off the competition. And Luke Short, rather than slink away with his tail tucked between his legs, instead called in a few of his friends, guys like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.

In time, Luke would have the backing of other hard cases like Doc Holliday and Texas Jack Vermillion. In the end though, the so-called Dodge City War was settled without so much as a single shot being fired. The threat of so many deadly men all converging there in Dodge was enough to make the city officials reconsider their position. This lack of bloodshed notwithstanding, the wild days weren’t over just yet.

Sure, the violence may have experienced a significant drop, at least in Dodge’s heyday, but there was still the occasional gunfight. Like the following summer when Mysterious Dave Mather began butting heads with the aforementioned Tom Nixon. The two of them ran competing saloons, and on top of that, there was a rumor that Mather was messing with Nixon’s wife. It all came to a head on the night of July 18th, 1884.

That’s when Nixon opened fire on Mather as he stood in the street outside his saloon. Only problem is he missed. Then, just three nights later, Dave walked up to Nixon and shot him dead. Per the July 22nd, 1884 edition of the Globe Livestock Journal, quote, “At about 10:00 last evening, while Assistant Marshal Thomas Nixon was on duty at the corner of Front Street and First Avenue, Mysterious Dave, who keeps a saloon in the Opera House, came downstairs and deliberately shot him through.

” The article then goes on to state that Mather, quote, “Called to Nixon, who was standing on the corner, and as Nixon turned around, Mather commenced shooting at him, firing four shots, killing him instantly. ” End of quote. And just a couple of years later, Mather went missing under very mysterious circumstances. By that point though, the party was just about over.

Remember that quarantine line? It never stopped moving. Farmers just kept right on coming, and by 1885 the Kansas legislature went ahead and extended the quarantine across the entire state. No Texas cattle, period.

And then just to make matters worse, the winter of 1885 and 1886 wreaked havoc across the Great Plains, part of a string of die-offs that absolutely gutted the cattle industry. It was just a mixture of everything. The Santa Fe Trail had been obsolete for quite some time. The buffalo were gone, and with the Indian Wars wrapping up there on the Southern Plains, the army no longer needed Fort Dodge.

In the span of just a little over a decade, everything that had built up Dodge’s economy, the buffalo hunters, the soldiers, the cowboys, had basically just dried up. As for the legend though, that wouldn’t go anywhere. Especially considering all the books and movies. Then later on, you had TV shows like Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.

There were even Wyatt Earp comic books featuring Dodge City. The real Dodge City took full advantage, building a replica of Front Street for the tourists, holding mock shootouts daily during the summer, even a replica of the Long Branch just a few blocks from the original. So, was Dodge City really the wickedest little city in America? Well, yeah, but only for about a year.

Back when it was still a lawless buffalo camp, roughly from the summer of 1872 to the summer of 1873. But the Dodge City that most people think about, with the cowboys and Wyatt Earp and the Long Branch, it really wasn’t all that bad. From 1876 to 1885, they only experienced 15 homicides, or an average of about one and a half per year.