Buffalo to bovine

Sept. 25, Kinsley-Dodge City, 45 miles, SW-NW breeze, 80/45—Dodge City has been dealing in either buffalo or cattle for a long time. When it was founded in 1872, it immediately became the primary commercial center for buffalo hunters and hide dealers, who shipped out millions of hides.

Hardy Texas longhorn herds were driven to Dodge City from Texas starting in 1875 on the Western and Jones and Plummer trails. This was the heyday of Dodge City's notoriety, when it was a rough place full of opportunities for newly arrived cowboys to lose their money gambling at faro or poker, or in saloons and brothels. It was also a more diverse place than we think. On the great Texas cattle drives, around a third of the cowboys were blacks, Mexican vaqueros, and Indians.

Today Dodge City makes its tourist dollars off a re-creation of Front Street and Boot Hill, named because those buried there had no friends or family and were buried with their boots on. The real Front Street was torn down in 1970 for urban renewal.

The old Dodge inspired movie westerns and the TV series Gunsmoke, plus so many dime novels that late in life Bat Masterson turned down a job as U.S. marshal of Oklahoma Territory offered by his friend, President Teddy Roosevelt. Masterson knew too many people had read about him and Dodge and would want to make their reputation against him. Instead he became a sportwriter in New York City.

Now, instead of gamblers and and famous lawman (Bat and Ed Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman), Dodge City is dominated by two enormous meatpacking operations, Excel (part of Cargill) and National Beef (Farmland). Other Dodge industries are built around beef: feed companies, livestock companies, trucking companies. Most of the workforce at the two meatpackers are from Mexico, most legal and some not. Both companies, I heard, are fined regularly for undocumented workers.

So many Mexicans have immigrated here to work in the plants that about 45 percent of Dodge City's 25,000 people are Latino. In the school system, Latinos are over 60 percent of the students. Most of the growth has taken place since about 1990.

At a grocery store I met Victor, who had worked at National Beef for 10 years. He'd moved to Dodge City from Los Angeles and was glad to be here working a good job. He came from Mexico, where he used to ride his bike everywhere, he said. I was interested in him, but he wanted to talk about my trip, not himself. I liked that he saw the adventure part of my trip where many people just saw miles of riding.

Whatever views one may have on immigrant workers, Mexican influence in these parts is almost 500 years old. A few miles east of the city is Coronado crossing, a possible location for the 1541 crossing of the Arkansas River by the conquistador Coronado and his Spanish-Indian force. Gold-crazed, he was searching for Quivera, one of the legendary (and non-existent) seven cities of gold.

When I parked my bike at the Coronado monument, the first voices I heard were in Spanish, from the house next door. After crossing the Arkansas, Coronado's priest held a mass of thanksgiving. Since this is regarded as the first Christian mass in what is now the United States, Dodge City churches and organizations sponsored the monument for the 1976 American bicentennial. Coronado nearly reached present-day Lindsborg, Kan. before turning around.

Nearby is Dodge City's reason for being: Fort Dodge was one of the army outposts on the Santa Fe Trail. This trail was for commerce, not emigration, with Mexican merchants going to Missouri and vice-versa. Four original building from the fort remain, now part of the Kansas Soldiers' Home. Visitors are welcome to walk around the grounds and see both the old barracks and cozy bungalows for World War II and Korean War veterans.