Dodge City day! I have waited for this day since early childhood when my dad and I used to listen to old time radio westerns in the car on long drives home. We woke to puffy cotton falling from trees, and young toads hopping all around, the camp cat, and mosquitoes. Swarms of mosquitoes. We take the good with the bad.
Our entire day was dedicated to Dodge City. The town has re-constructed the original town from pictures and writings available from that time. So we did the tourist thing and went to the re-constructed town. The first thing we encountered was an old train engine with no restrictions on how the kids could play on it. They would likely have been happy to play on that train all day, but we wanted to see the town, so we finally pulled them away and crossed the street. It was magical to walk on the cobbled street that was the original Front Street, to look beyond to Boot Hill. There is something magical about walking into history, to imagine Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty and Chester, and all the other fictional folks who help children love to learn history, to walk where their fictional ghost walks still. And oddly enough, the Wild West is the only era of history I actually love. It helps that A Study in Scarlett nudged my imagination further on, but really, it was Gunsmoke that made me care.
Once inside the town enclosure, we came upon a shoot-out! Ha! Drunk cowboys spilling out of the Long Branch, arguing over whose beer was whose, dancing girls looking on, and suddenly, the sheriff showed up. Shots were fired, and when it was over, only the sheriff survived! Even the dancing girls lay dead. They made their point that the West was a dangerous place, far more dangerous than the movies and radio shows made it out to be, and nobody was excluded.
It was a town like one would imagine. It had a little school house, a great Victorian doll house, a church with a steeple, a town outhouse, an ice cream parlor (we had a non-vegan treat there), a jail, all the little stores old Western towns needed, and, yes, the Long Branch. 
We lounged around for some time, enjoying the root beer, while one of Miss Kitty*s dancing girls taught Kiki to can can. She was even certified as an official dancing girl substitute in case one of the girls got shot before the show that night!
Rising somewhat ominously above Dodge City is Boot hill. When the town began, and people started to die, they needed a place to put all those dead bodies, and so they took them to Boot Hill and buried them in shallow graves with their boots still on. Most were buried without a coffin.
There is so much history surrounding Dodge city, and most of it is nefarious. It was even founded on vice and expoitation! The US was having trouble keeping the Indians at bay, and they knew that if they destroyed their food supply, buffalo, the Indians would leave. So they sent out Buffalo hunters and set up Fort Dodge. They then discovered that the soldiers became downright unruly when drunk, so alcohol was prohibited. One business savvy man surveyed the financial environment, bought a wagon load of liquor, hauled it across the prairie, and set up shop on the tailgate of his wagon 5 miles outside of Ft. Dodge. That place and that first wagon saloon became Dodge City, and within a very short time, it was a thriving town based on, yep, liquor and women! It was known as the Babylon of the West! The Buffalo were hunted almost to extinction, but that did not mean Dodge City died. Soon enough, the rail road came out, and it came right to Dodge. Texan ranchers drove their cattle to Dodge, and it switched from the Buffalo hunter hangout of the West to the Cowboy hangout of the West. Cattle came to dodge, they were loaded onto cattle cars, the cowboys were paid, and there were plenty of women and saloon owners who wanted their money. For much of this time, there were not law men in the West. Murders were common. In fact, some cowboys thought it was funny to ride around shooting into houses for no reason but the fact that they could. Women were murdered in their beds while their men were in town, their babies left to starve and die. Men and women killed one another in bar fights, there was terrible sanitation and no medical treatment, and so the wounded often died of infections.
Then it all changed. Law men like Wyatt Earp came to town. Within the span of a few years, the combined forces of strong law men, brave clergy, who ddin*t take nonsense off the cowboys, and a Texas cattle sickness calling for a cattle quarantine, and therefore cessation of cattle drives to Dodge, cleaned up the town. People began to settle down, to farm, to raise cattle around Dodge, and the prohibition Kansas began in 1880 finally reached Dodge in 1885. Then most saloons turned into pharmacies. The Wild West was tamed.
After exploring the town all day, we stayed the evening for the ranch house dinner and saloon show. Brandon and the kids got to eat real Kansas BBQ, we got to see Miss Kitty*s variety show, 
we drank beer at the Long Branch, and Judah spent the entire show shooting at people around him with the cowboy gun he got earlier in the day. We all left a little wilder, a little less lawful, and a far greater, and more sobering, understanding of the way the West was won.
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