CORONADO

Once you know about Dodge City, you know something about American history. At first there was nothing where it is except the Santa Fe Trail. In 1838 the last of the Cherokees passed by on the Trail of Tears. In 1858 Fort Dodge was established to deal with unhappy Indians, and the California gold rush that ran from 1848 to 1855 really increased traffic on the Trail. Since the government aimed to get the Indians who didn’t seem to appreciate the growth of the U.S. out of the way, killing off the Indians’ ticket to life was a good way to do it. So you had guys coming along to hunt the bison the Indians relied on for food, clothing, shelter. Buffalo Bill was one of them. He killed bison for the guys building the railroad which was a bigger, faster version of the Santa Fe Trail that the Indians got even more ticked off about. It wasn’t but a few years after the railroad got to where Dodge City is, in 1872, that most of the bison were gone. The bison killers needed equipment and entertainment and a place to clean up, and the result was Dodge City was a boom town by 1883 and grew faster than Arcosanti ever will. Pioneers started coming along to settle on land the Indians felt belonged to no one if not them, and cattle drives by these cowboys picked up where the bison left off. But it’s getting almost as hard to find cowboys anymore, Sine, as it is to find bison and Indians.

By 1869 you could go across the whole of America on the railroad. And though it’s not in Dodge City, I’ve got a special link for Sine about the railroad, because two out of every three workers who built the Union Pacific Railroad from San Francisco to Utah were Chinese. They just needed the work. What they built connected with the eastern section from Omaha to Utah that was built by Civil War veterans and Irish immigrants. I don’t know if anybody ever tried to get the Indians to build it, but I imagine the Indians would have told them to shove it. Although the National Park Service likes to give everybody a pat on the back and has a Park at Promontory Point in Utah where they connected the railroads with the golden spike, I’m not making that big a deal out of it since you can’t get to it by train anymore. What can I say? Things change. The California Zephyr between Chicago and San Francisco comes as close as you can get on a train. But, if you really want to see it, the good thing is it’s only 90 mies north of Aura’s Antelope Island. So hit the link to check it out. And get Aura to take you sometime.

I’m giving you a bunch of other links in this note also so you can get punch drunk on Dodge City. One of ‘em is some stuff about the Santa Fe Trail ruts ruts I was kidding you about Sine. Dodge City is quite proud of the ones you can still see there.