Wedding Ride - Summer of 2013 - On to Dodge City

I enjoyed a good couple of days hanging out in Denver with my club brothers.  Stretch’s wedding was on a Saturday night and I managed to keep the partying to a respectable level given my plan was to be up and on the road by 6 the next morning.  I had a relatively short day planned riding from Denver to Dodge City, Kansas (365 miles), but I had a lot of things I wanted to see along the way.

Dodge City was on my stop list because, well, it’s Dodge City.  The fictional home of Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty.  The cowboy in me insisted I needed to stop in for a visit.  Assuming I got to Dodge City early enough, I'd be able to wander around town before the sun went down.

I only had to do about 80 miles of interstate to start the day and after that I was good to go on US highways, mostly two lane, from Limon, Colorado to Dodge City.  I left I-70 and headed south on US-287 across the plains of eastern Colorado.  As I passed through the small town of Hugo, I noticed another sculpture sitting in front of the local bank.  I decided to make a U-turn and go back and check it out since it looked pretty cool as I past it.

I’m glad I did.  It turned out to be another impressive sculpture by Charlie Norton (the same sculptor who created the Buffalo Bill sculpture in Oakley, Kansas).  This one was called “The Partners” and was a monument to the way of life on the plains and how neighbors, even though maybe separated by miles, helped each other when they needed it.  As I've now come to expect from Charlie Norton, the detail in the sculpture is incredible. 

"The Partners" depicts a male and female rancher holding a newborn calf while their faithful dog stands watch for predators on the plains.

From Hugo, I continued south on US-287 to Kit Carson.  I used my instincts again to draw me to my next stop which was the Trading Post Restaurant.  I noticed the parking lot was full of pickup trucks.  That's always a good sign, particularly in the morning when you’re looking for breakfast.  I pulled in and ordered my usual, biscuits and gravy.

I have never gone wrong when I have stopped at a restaurant with pickup trucks filling the parking lot.  The Trading Post proved to be another good stop.

I know you've seen this shot before, but biscuits and gravy looks pretty much the same wherever you get it.  However, this is actually my breakfast at the Trading Post.

After leaving Kit Carson, I noticed some signs on US-287 referencing Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.  I checked the map, but felt it was a little too far off my route to go visit.  Plus, to get there would include five or six miles of dirt road and that's just not fun on a Harley.  Still, it piqued my interest, so I looked into it to find out what happened here.  

The Sand Creek Massacre was an atrocity that occurred during the Indian Wars on November 29, 1864.  A force of 700 men from the 1st and 3rd Colorado Cavalry and the 1st Regiment New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a campsite of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians.  Two officers, commanding the 1st Colorado Cavalry companies D and K, refused to follow Chivington's order and told their men to hold fire.  Chivington's remaining soldiers massacred many of the campsite's inhabitants.  Historian Alan Brinkley wrote that 133 Indians were killed, 105 of whom were women and children.  Kind of makes you think maybe the white man entering the plains states in the 1860's knew a little about terrorism techniques too.

A few more miles on US-287 and I connected with US-50 and headed east.  I always enjoy getting on US-50.  It runs from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco, California.  It passes about 7 miles north of my home in Virginia, so anytime I’m on it, from anywhere in the country, I feel like I’m close to home.  I’ve ridden it from Ocean City to St. Louis, Missouri and then various parts of it west of St. Louis in Kansas and Colorado.

I keep thinking I’ll do a cross country ride across US-50 one of these days.  I really want to do the stretch in Nevada that’s called “The Loneliest Road in America”.  Plus, the stretch in central and western Colorado travels through some of the most scenic areas in the country including Royal Gorge, Monarch Pass (over the Continental Divide) and Gunnison, just to name a few.

I made a stop in Lamar to top off the gas tank.  While I was there I wanted to check out a building made of petrified wood.  I snapped a couple of pictures of that building and then rode a few more blocks to the Lamar Train Depot.  The Depot sits in a picturesque park called “Enchanted Forest” and serves as home to the Colorado Welcome Center and Lamar Chamber of Commerce as well as the station for Amtrak's Southwest Chief passenger train.

Lamar's petrified wood building was built by lumber dealer W. G. Brown in 1932.  The building walls and floors are constructed of large pieces of petrified wood thought to be more than 175 million years old.  Based on the sign out front, Ripley's Believe it or Not calls it the only such structure in the world.

Lamar's restored 1907 Train Depot and Amtrak Station.

The park is also home to several interesting items that represent the history and future of Lamar.  There’s a historic steam locomotive sitting beside a water tank and windmill paying tribute to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railway.  There’s also a wind turbine blade that gives you an up close feel as to how large the wind turbines are as well as shows how Lamar is making use of what has always been considered the bane of existence here: the wind.  Added to all of that were two sculptures that again gave me a feel for the territory I was riding.

The AT&SF train display.  AT&SF was one of the larger railroads in the US and was chartered in 1859. The railroad ceased operations in 1996 when it merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF).

Locomotive #1819 was manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works out of Philadelphia, PA in 1906 and hauled freight and passengers nearly a million miles before being retired in 1953.

111-foot long General Electric wind turbine blade.  When you think of three of these mounted on the windmills in the wind farms, it's kind of amazing how huge they are.

This bronze sculpture is titled "Short Fuse on a Slack Rope" and was created by sculptor Justin I. Young, Jr.  A plaque on the memorial reads: "Perseverance is the virtue of the West, symbolized by this determined cowboy, roping an equally determined bull. Like a fractious bull, land may be owned, but it cannot always be controlled. Therefore, this monument is dedicated to the pioneers of Prowers County who lassoed an untamed country, then held on tight."

The Madonna of the Trail honors the pioneer mothers of covered wagon days on the Santa Fe Trail.  This monument is one of only 12 in the world.  Lamar was chosen for one of the statues because it was located on the Old Santa Fe Trail highway.

From Lamar, I continued east on US-50 headed toward Garden City, Kansas. I crossed back into Kansas 32 miles later and then re-entered the Central Time Zone just east of Kendall, Kansas.  That's the biggest problem with traveling east, when you lose that hour each time you cross a time zone. 

About 7 miles west of Garden City is a small town called Holcomb.  Holcomb is the town made famous in Truman Capote's true story book, In Cold Blood, where Richard Hickock and Perry Smith brutally murdered a local farmer, Herbert Clutter, his wife and two of their four children in 1959.  Capote spent six years writing the book that became one of the best selling books of the true crime genre.

I couldn't get close enough to the house to get a decent picture because it sits across a field.  I fried my camera at the beach a couple of weeks before, so I was taking pictures on this trip using my phone.  Rather than try my luck trespassing, I decided to just move along.  But, it was interesting to ride by just the same.

I missed my turn out of Holcomb that would have taken me to Garden City along the Arkansas River, but I made it just the same albeit a couple of extra miles.  Dodge City is only about 50 miles from Garden City and US-50 basically follows the river between the two cities.  The only real problem I could see was that there appeared to be some serious rain both north and south of US-50.  The question was, can I sneak between the storms or was I going to get wet again.  I got lucky and split the storms and rode into Dodge City mid-afternoon.

The Dodge City welcome sign on US-50. Another biker had parked and walked up to the sign, so I had to wait for him to walk around to the back side of the sign so I could take this picture.

I was really excited about visiting Dodge City.  Besides being the location for the show Gunsmoke, the real history of the town was my main attraction.  It all started when the US government built Fort Dodge in 1865 as a means of improving the protection for travelers and settlers using the Santa Fe Trail.  The town was laid out in 1872, but consisted of one saloon in a tent to service the soldiers from Fort Dodge.  The railroad also arrived that year and soon brought the cattle business with it.

This picture of James Arness and Amanda Blake (Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty) hangs in one of the shops that serves as a self-guided museum along Front Street in Dodge City.

The way Dodge City became the "Queen of the Cow Towns" is interesting in and of itself.  Texas Longhorns carried a tick that caused a disease called Texas Fever among other breeds of cattle.  So, when Texas ranchers wanted to drive their cattle to the railheads in Kansas they used what was known as the Shawnee Trail to go to southeastern Kansas.  Kansas ranchers persuaded their legislators to set up a quarantine that would keep the Texas cattle in the central part of the state.  This route used the Chisholm Trail toward Abilene, Kansas.  Once central Kansas started getting settled, they persuaded their lawmakers to move the quarantine line further west.

El Capitan is a life-sized bronze sculpture of a Texas longhorn steer.  From 1875 to 1885, over four million longhorn cattle were shipped to eastern markets from the railhead in Dodge City.

The movement of the quarantine west meant cattle would branch off the Chisholm Trail to what was called the Great Western Cattle Trail or Western Trail.  The Western Trail led the cattle into Dodge City.  Dodge City's peak cattle years were 1883 to 1884.  Dodge City was a true wild west frontier town and had more gunfighters working at one time or another than any other town in the West.  It also had more than its fair share of saloons, gambling halls and brothels.  Dodge City also had some of the West's more famous lawmen.  Men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Charlie Bassett all worked in Dodge City in some law enforcement capacity.

Front Street in Dodge City. While it's a tourist trap, the Boot Hill Museum was still fun to wander through the various shops that are basically a self-guided tour through the history of the town and area.

The Boot Hill section of the museum where eventually 30 graves were dug, including one female, Alice Chambers.  It's believed that 15 men were killed in Dodge City in 1873.

I paid my admission fee ($15, I think) to get into the Boot Hill Museum area and walked through the various displays.  There were period shops where costumed staff would explain what that particular shop might have done like the print shop and the bank.  I eventually made my way to Beatty and Kelley’s Restaurant.  From 1872 to 1879 this restaurant was a saloon.  Now it serves lunch and treats to guests at Boot Hill Museum during the summer months.  The attraction for me was the delightful selection of hand dipped ice cream treats.  I had the girl behind the counter load up a triple cone of Butter Pecan for me and wandered outside to enjoy my "lunch".

The singer and piano player in the Longbranch Saloon.  You gotta love the sign that says, "Don't shoot the piano player...I'm doing the best I can."

Buffalo displayed in the Boot Hill Museum.

I learned more about the Great Buffalo Massacre in the Boot Hill Museum.  The U.S. began to expand westward after the Civil War.  The white men began to infringe more and more on the Indians' lands.  Part of the strategy for driving the Indians off the plains was to kill the buffalo because wherever the buffalo flourished, the Indians flourished.  As a result, the buffalo were slaughtered in unbelievable numbers.  The buffalo population is estimated to be between 20 and 30 million buffalo in the mid-1800's.  By 1889, only 549 buffalo remained.  Luckily, we wised up before we completely terminated the entire species and now there are a few hundred thousand buffalo in the U.S.

There were light showers all around Dodge City during the afternoon, but none that prevented me from my sightseeing.  After wandering around Front Street and the Boot Hill Museum, I made my way across the street toward the Dodge City Depot.

My main reason for checking out the depot was the two large sundials they have in the courtyard next to the depot.  There are two of them set up to show the time in Central Time as well as Mountain Time.  When the original time zones were set by the railroads in 1883 the line between Central and Mountain time ran between the two sundials.

Dodge City Depot and Amtrak Station.

The two sundials sitting east of the Dodge City Depot.  The sundial in the foreground represents the time in Central Standard Time while the one in the background shows Mountain Standard Time.  The dials are about 42 feet in diameter.

One interesting thing about the Amtrak schedule is that it's always dark when the Amtrak train is at the station, so the huge sundials on the east lawn of the depot cannot be seen in use by those passengers.

It was getting later in the day and I decided to try out a local bar called, Kate's, that I saw on the Internet.  Unfortunately, Kate's isn't opened on Sundays, so I made my way back to my motel with a light sprinkling of rain splashing off my glasses and windshield.  They don't have a Motel 6 in Dodge City, so I was staying at Americas Best Value Inn and as luck would have it, Bad Habits Sports Bar was right across the street.  I decided to park the bike for the day and walk over to Bad Habits.  It sounded like my kind of place.

Dinner at Bad Habits started with a healthy salad.  Renee would be proud of me.

She would be proud right up until they brought this plate of mm, mm, good.

A good dinner and a few Coors Lights later, I was ready to cross back over Wyatt Earp Blvd and call it a day.  I enjoyed my visit to Dodge City.  It was a little hokey at Boot Hill Museum, but still fun.  If I would have hung out a little longer, I later learned that they have a gunfight at 7PM.  But, I missed it.  Oh well, maybe next time.

The next post will cover my ride from Dodge City to Bristow, Oklahoma to visit my in-laws and then I finally make it to Texas to meet Miss Kayla Renee Riddle.  Until then, ride/drive safe and get out there and explore.

Miss Kayla...the best reason of all to ride across the country!