Dodge City: 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 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.
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