Happiness is a strange emotion, not a single thing, but really an umbrella term for a diffuse group of hard-to-define states. Periodically, studies are published about which nation is the happiest (usually, it seems, a Scandinavian country.) But what they are measuring is a rather tepid version of happiness. Usually, if we ask if someone is happy, what we mean is an absence of problems — basically a neutral state in which we are not currently threatened, hurting, being oppressed, or worried. “Are you happy?” “Yeah, sure, I guess so.” Enough to eat, a roof over the head, a relationship that isn’t a chore, no pending hospital bills or tax audits.
Really, that is a condition to be wished for, as dull as it sounds. For most people in the world, its achievement would be a godsend. So, I don’t want to downplay such a state. Not getting bombed is a net positive. Yet, there are other happinesses. Falling in love, birth of a child, success at work — these all provide a joyful uplift that raises the psyche above the day-to-day and makes life more radiant, if only briefly. It is a state we cannot maintain over long periods without being considered a bit loopy. So, we return back to the state of happiness that is unremarkable.
But, as adults, we can watch our children at play and recognize in their faces such a state of unreflective happiness that can only break our hearts. Oh, what they don’t know yet about being alive. It’s not just an emotion: The entire body explodes with it.
There is what I might call “body happiness,” which they express in movement, in play, in dancing and skipping, singing, letting out squeals that express the inner state that, as adults, we can only mourn the loss of. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.”
I mention all this because one of the reasons I listen to music — primarily, for me, what is called classical music — is its ability to evoke emotions in its listeners. They arise sympathetically and are often emotions more subtle than mere language can name. It has been said that music is more precise than words, and I recognize that, whenever I am moved by a quartet or sonata but cannot speak exactly the words that would distort the emotion into easily fixed categories.
A standard symphony moves from thought to thought, emotion to emotion, in ways that express the same sort of progress a story makes, beginning, middle, end. Episodes all build together to a longer, coherent emotional or intellectual ride. Our limbic system moves along with that progress and we can basically take our emotional selves through the moves. The widest range is the most completely human.
And one of the things music can express is that ebullient, body happiness, so that we can feel it again.
Mostly, it jumps out of a single movement in the whole, or even a few bars in the movement, but it is inexpressible joy, and it makes our body move, to tap toes or sway our bodies to and fro, often with a surprised smile on our faces. I think of the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, for instance, or the scherzo from Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony. I can’t sit still while listening.
George Frideric Handel has two “happy”numbers in his Acis and Galatea. The opening chorus sings of “Oh the pleasures of the plains, happy nymphs and happy swains,” which extolls the life of the peasants, and a love duet that repeats endlessly, “Happy, happy, happy we.” It all sets up the tragic ending.
But, there are a very few works that take that body happiness from start to finish, works you can play or stream, that will infallibly lift your mood and remind you of the happiness that is upwards of neutral, and can replace all the fret and sorrow for the length of its performance, and usually, for some time after, as you bathe in the memory of its tunes.
There are at least eight of these that I can name, which always leave me uplifted, my senses turned up several notches, and my memory of childhood’s version of happiness is re-animated.
Prime among these is Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. It bounces and sings through five distinct movements, each of which floods with tune, rhythm and color, anchored by the bottom notes of the double bass.
It was written in 1819, when Schubert was 22 years old, and before the lingering illness that eventually killed him nine years later. The haunting of death darkens the later String Quintet that he completed in 1828, just two months before his death. But the “Trout” is the antithesis of all that: Life giving, life affirming, joyful from first bar to last. What can you do when every tune is an ear-worm. Once inside your body, you carry the “Trout” with you the rest of your life. Play it every time you need it.
Less well-known, but even more relentless is Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit, or “The Ox on the Roof.” Milhaud wrote it in 1919 after living in Brazil for two years in the French diplomatic service, and quotes dozens of Brazilian folk songs, adapted into a dance-hall band playing Latin rhythms, complete with güiro. He employs a polytonal technique, where different parts of the band play in different keys at the same time, giving the whole a piquancy and aliveness that has a feeling of spontaneity, like an amateur band in a smoky bar. It’s always just about to come apart.
Written in the Baroque form of ritornello, with an 8-bar tune coming back over an over between alternate dances, it has some 20 Brazilian tunes buried in it, with infectious beats that express the unabashed happiness of a sweaty dance hall. Evybody dance now!
Mostly we think of Johannes Brahms as a sober German burgher writing symphonies with the seriousness required of höchste Deutsches Kunst. But the boy could let his hair down, which he did with two sets of vocal quartets, Liebeslieder Waltzes, op. 52 and op. 65.
Brahms made his living, early in his career, when he moved to Vienna, as leader of various choruses such as the Singakademie and Musikverein, for which he wrote tons of choral music and songs. So, he had a popular streak in him.
The 33 songs, each no longer than a minute or two, celebrate bourgeois domestic love in tunes so meltingly gemütlich that you will have them running through your head for days. They were meant to be sung in homes or in taverns, so they are best with normal voices, not the operatically trained soloists that so often record the set. “Ich gäbe dir so gern hunderttausend Küsse” — “I long to give you a hundred thousand kisses.”
When Georges Bizet was a mere stripling of 17, he wrote a Symphony in C as an exercise for his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. It was never performed in his lifetime and ultimately forgotten about, until it was rediscovered in 1933, and performed two years later by Felix Wiengartner, a suitable conductor, whose first name means “happy.”
Bouncy and tuneful from first note to last, it has proven hugely popular since then, and one wonders why Bizet never had it published, in fact, never even mentioned it. It is a masterpiece, but not on one of those marble pedestals, but the kind that makes your ears grateful to be on your head. It is breezy and fluent and just makes you happy to be alive.
Georges Balanchine choreographed it for the Paris Opera Ballet, and I was lucky enough to see the New York City Ballet perform it with a live orchestra at the Palais Garnier in Paris, (where it was first performed in 1947). One of the highlights of my life.
Also a youthful work is Serge Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, written in 1916 when he was a conducting student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. When one of his teachers, Boris Asafyev, mused “that there is no true joyfulness to be found in Russian music,” as Prokofiev wrote, he responded with one of the happiest works ever written by a Russian.
And so, he wrote in his diary, “I composed a new finale, lively and blithe enough for there to be a complete absence of minor triads in the whole movement, only major ones.”
It displays what is often called the composer’s “wrong note Romanticism,” with catchy tunes and ascerbic harmonies, and was meant to mimic the spirit of Haydn and Mozart. What a joy.
Much shorter, at merely five minutes, but so fresh and lively as to become its composer’s most frequently performed piece, the overture Leonard Bernstein wrote to his musical Candide just can’t stop laughing, and teasing, with bubbling wit and elan.
The musical (or operetta — it could never entirely make up its mind and went through multiple reworkings) never quite caught on the way West Side Story has, but its overture, shaped as a mock Rossini overture, is irresistible.
Johann Strauss II produced music the way a lawn sprinkler sprays water. The “Waltz King” composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music and several operettas, all of surprisingly consistent craftsmanship.
No one in his right mind, though, would sit for all of it; before too long the program would become monotonous: How do you tell one polka from another. That is, except for the large handful of truly memorable masterpieces, all of which will raise you spirits and make you want to dance.
I mean, the Blue Danube, the Voices of Spring, Tales of the Vienna Woods, the Artist’s Life, the Kaiser Waltz — a CD full of the best Strauss is a must-have for any collection. It’s hardly surprising that Brahms envied Strauss’ gift for melody. Each is basically a tone poem in three-four time. Lift the spirits, make you smile and move your body.
Finally, there is Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, which displays a childlike joy in just spinning tunes, which is hardly surprising, since he wrote those tunes when he was a child, between the ages of 10 and 13. When he turned 20, he reworked the tunes into this four-movement suite for strings, with movements titled “Boisterous Bouree,” “Playful Pizzicato,” “Sentimental Sarabade,” and “Frolicsome Finale.” It premiered in 1934 with Britten conducting.
Since then, it has been recorded dozens of times, usually as a filler on discs with other Britten pieces.
There are other joyful pieces, but these are eight that come immediately to mind. They are each available in videos on YouTube, and worth seeking out, especially if you’re having a bit of a down day.
It began when I was watching syndicated reruns of old Gunsmoke episodes and I couldn’t help, as an adult, but wonder, “Where do all these people live?” I mean, there didn’t seem to be any houses in Dodge City.
Yes, we saw that Marshall Dillon slept on a cot in his office and that Miss Kitty had a room at the back of the saloon, and Doc Adams had an apartment attached to his surgery. And perhaps Sam the bartender had a room upstairs at the Long Branch and perhaps Jonas had a second-floor apartment above his general store. But the town was fully populated with people and the only street we ever see on Gunsmoke is lined with shops and businesses — at least two saloons, the Dodge House hotel and a restaurant where the gang often dined. Where were the houses?
I know it’s not really important. Westerns are America’s foundational myth, and like myths from the time of Gilgamesh through Ancient Greece and up to Gunsmoke, we don’t ask realism of the stories. They are moral tales, parables, etiologies, and euhemeristic histories. Unnecessary detail just clutters up the telling of the tale. As I said before, no one asks if Hercules had a mortgage.
But the issue of Dodge City housing interested me nonetheless.
I found an old map of Dodge City from 1882 and there were plenty of houses along the side streets that led off from Front Street, the main road of the town. There were four churches, a courthouse, a school, a grist mill, an Odd Fellows Hall, a railroad depot, a newspaper office and at least four hotels, including the Dodge House, Cox & Boyd, proprietors.
Admittedly, 1882 is about five or six years later than the fictional Gunsmoke Dodge was supposedly set (according to its creators), but it should tell us something about Western settlements of the era. Yet, except for a few episodes of rowdy trail hands shooting up the place, Gunsmoke rarely mentions either the railroad or the cattle business. Where are the cattle pens? Why does no one ever mention the stink?
Then I discovered a trove of historical photographs from the Gunsmoke era and pored over them for what they might tell me.
Gunsmoke, first on radio and then on TV for 20 years was intended as an “adult” Western, with more grown-up plots and themes than the standard cowboy movie. And in the early years, largely succeeds, with some quite grim stories about the difficulties of life on the prairie. But even given that, the series relies on many of the Western movie tropes, including its sense of how a Western town is built and functions: one main street lined with storefronts and saloons.
As I have said, I am not asking a television entertainment to be a documentary, and I am not complaining that Matt Dillon’s town had little to do with the historical Dodge City. But I couldn’t help but want to find out what the reality might have been.
Ruts still visible from the Santa Fe Trail, near Dodge City
A little background: Once, there was a piece of land in the middle of the continent halfway between another piece of land controlled by people speaking English and another piece of land controlled by people speaking Spanish. And the English- and Spanish- speaking peoples wanted to do business together and so wagons of goods moved from one side of America to the other side along familiar routes that eventually became well-worn trails. The one we’re concerned with was called the Santa Fe Trail.
Of course, the parcel of land between them was not empty, but occupied by native peoples, who sometimes took exception to the Europeans who trespassed over their land, and so, the English-speaking peoples sent out their army to build forts along the trails to protect the merchants and their teamsters, and later to protect the European immigrants who wanted to live in the middle of the continent or travel across it to get to the parts further west.
Fort Dodge in 1879 and General Grenville Dodge
And so, on April 10, 1865, a company of soldiers from the Eleventh Cavalry Regiment under orders from General Grenville M. Dodge established a camp on the Arkansas River along the Santa Fe Trail. Lacking building materials, they made dug-outs into the river banks for shelter. Dodge later wrote in his autobiography that the soldiers sarcastically named the place after him because they “were so mad at being sent there .. with so little accommodations that they named the place Camp Dodge.”
Arkansas River near Fort Dodge
Sidenote No. 1
Researching history can be a nightmare. There are ambiguous and conflicting sources everywhere. Dates are in question, name spellings are helter skelter, tall tales sometimes intrude with frequently told-fictions. First-hand accounts often appear to glorify their authors. I have tried to relate the most dependable version of Dodge City’s history, but there are sometimes smudgy areas.
For instance, Grenville Dodge isn’t the only Dodge involved, and sometimes one of the others gets credit for the fort’s name. In 1851 a Col. I Dodge established a fort to protect the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas. The fort proved temporary. Gen. Grenville Dodge ordered the construction of Fort Dodge near what is now Dodge City in 1865. Later, in 1872, the fort was commanded by Col. Richard Irving Dodge. Confusion seems inevitable.
Back to our story
The camp was soon refurbished with sod house buildings and then wood and stone buildings and officially became Fort Dodge and manned by up to four companies of soldiers.
Henry Sitler in later years, and his sod house in 1871
In 1871, rancher Henry L. Sitler built a sod house about five miles west of the fort, which became a stopping place for those traveling on the Santa Fe Trail, and a year later, a town was platted and George M. Hoover set up a tent to sell liquor to the soldiers at the fort. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived in town later that year and things picked up quickly.
At first it was the trade in buffalo hides that built Dodge City, with the bones and skins of the buffalo sent by rail back to the east. Indeed, the settlement was first named Buffalo City.
Buffalo hides at Dodge City
When cattle from Texas needed to be shipped to eastern markets, towns were established along the route of the railroad. In Kansas, first in Abilene, in 1867. An outbreak of cattle fever led to a quarantine line in the state, and the railhead moved further and further west, reaching Dodge City in 1876, roughly the years when fictional Marshal Dillon ruled the town.
From 1875 to 1886, some 5 million beeves were herded up the trail from Texas to Kansas railheads. In 1877 alone, Dodge City was the largest of the cattle-shipping boom towns, loading up and shipping out 500,000 head of cattle.
Route of the AT&SF Railway that got the beef to the slaughterhouses and meatpacking industry of Chicago
As Dodge City grew, and Kansas became more populated, the need for a fort on the Santa Fe Trail became less important, and by the end, when the fort closed in 1882, it was garrisoned by only about a dozen soldiers. The remaining buildings were later turned into a home for retired soldiers.
Dodge City, 1872
This was the milieu that the fictional Dodge City supposedly took place in.
Gunsmoke remained on TV for 20 years and the town barely changed, despite having moved from its original outdoor location shooting to being filmed on fabricated sets in the studio.
Constructing Dodge City in studio for “Gunsmoke”
The actual town grew and changed continuously, beginning in 1871 with a population of 1 — as Henry Sitler built a sod house in the location five miles from Fort Dodge — to a population near of 1200 just five years later and to 1,763 by the 1890 census. TV’s Dodge City should have been filled with ongoing construction. The trains not only took cattle out of Dodge, but brought in supplies and lumber to build the town in a region mostly devoid of timber.
The town was incorporated and platted in 1872, and George Hoover moved to a wood building on Front Street to serve thirsty Fort Dodge soldiers, buffalo hunters and the increasing number of cattle herders.
Front Street, Dodge City, 1872
Gunsmoke’s Dodge City was a standard-issue Western town, like those of so many other towns in other TV series and movies — a wide dirt street with wood-frame buildings on both sides.
The reality of Dodge City was that it was built alongside the Arkansas River, where the Santa Fe Trail paralleled the river. When the railroad came, it, too, followed the river. The town then grew on the far side of the tracks, leaving the town plan with the river to the south, the tracks to the north, and Front Street and the primary businesses in a single row on the north side of the street, as shown in this detail of the bird’s-eye view map, from 1882.
This was a common city plan, and can be found all across both the West and the South, wherever a town grew alongside railway tracks. Tracks; road; storefronts, in that order.
Winter 1872, Dodge City
Sidenote No. 2
The constant growth of the town from 1871 to 1900 means that there is no single version of Dodge City to be had. It was always changing. Over the two decades of Matt Dillon’s TV tenure, the place barely changed a whit, although Dillon did. James Arness was 32 with a boyish face when the series began. When the series ended, he was in his 50s. Gunsmoke movies continued to be made, and by the time of the last, Gunsmoke: One Man’s Justice, from 1994, Arness was 71, which, if we insist on a concurrent timeline, puts the movie’s action into roughly 1914.
The TV show seems to remain static in time, other than the persistent aging of its inhabitants, but if we pretend the town aged as the actors did, the final episodes would have taken place in the 1890s. By then the cattle drives were long over, the town had settled into domesticity, and the six-guns and stetsons were relics of the past. The most common hat worn by men in Dodge city was a bowler.
Back to the main story
Dodge City, 1873
In the group of photos I collected, I found records of many of the town’s inhabitants, and they tell a story of Dodge City’s growth and character. I wanted to share a few of them. I purposely did not include information on several of the more mythic figures that are frequently dredged out to tell the tale. You can find all kinds of stories about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Dora Hand or Bat Masterson, and they have all been through the Dime Novel, Hollywood movie, TV series myth-making machine and many of their stories are questionable at best. Many conflicting versions abound.
So, I wanted to mention George Hoover, Chalk Beeson, Ben Hodges, Thomas McCarty, James “Dog” Kelley, Ormond Wright, and Squirrel Tooth Alice, among others, all of whom are central to Dodge City’s history.
George Hoover and wife, Margaret
Hoover was the second person, after Henry Sitler, to settle on the site of what would become the town, in 1872 and set up a bar to serve travelers and the soldiers of Fort Dodge. He sold whisky by the ladle for 25 cents (equivalent value today: about $20.) At the time, alcohol was forbidden at Fort Dodge and for a radius of five miles, which is why Hoover’s tent-and-wood-plank bar was opened where it was and Dodge City took hold five miles from the fort.
Hoover became the town’s first elected mayor, reelected three times, became a state legislator, and, after many successful businesses, opened the town’s first bank. He died in 1914, a few months after his wife, Margaret, died. He said, according to the July 16, 1914, Dodge City Globe, “that he had but little desire to live longer, and declared that life had no more interest for him [after his wife’s death].”
James Kelley, Kelley on horse, and Ben Hodges
British-born James Kelley was mayor of Dodge City from 1877 to 1881. He was part owner of the Beatty and Kelley Restaurant and kept a tamed black bear, named Teddy, behind the shop. Kelley had a white horse and often wore a white corduroy suit and kept a bunch of greyhounds, hence his nickname, “Dog” Kelley. His restaurant burned down in 1885 and he opened up the Kelley Opera House on the corner of Front Street and First Avenue. Kelley died in 1912, having spent his last years at the soldiers’ home at the former Fort Dodge.
Dodge City, 1878
Ben Hodges was half-Mexican, half Black and a cook’s helper on a cattle drive, who stopped in Dodge in 1872 and began a series of (unsuccessful) land-deal swindles and claims to wealth and nobility. He lived for years in a little shack on the south side of town, near the river and kept young boys fascinated with his tall tales. The town seems to have tolerated Ben as the “town character.” He was made an “Assistant Deputy” and allowed to carry a gun, minus the firing pin and his shoplifting of food from stores was accepted since, “he only took what he needed.”
When he died, in 1929, a collection was raised to buy him a plot in the elite Catholic cemetery rather than a pauper’s grave. According to one pall bearer, “We wanted him where they could keep an eye on him.”
Larry Deger and T.L. McCarty
Dodge City’s original Matt Dillon and Doc Adams were Marshal Lawrence Deger and Dr. Thomas McCarty. Deger was the first marshal of the town.
From 1871 till it was incorporated in 1875, Dodge City had no law officers, and things were quite chaotic, with a number of murders gone unaddressed until a vigilance committee was formed. Unfortunately, the committee soon became the source of violence and the Kansas governor appointed Charles Bassett sheriff of Ford County in an attempt to establish some order. It is estimated that between 1872 and 1876, some 70,875 gallons of whiskey were consumed in Dodge City, which is the equivalent of approximately or 4,536,000 individual shots — a lot for a town of about a thousand citizens.
St. James Saloon, Dodge City
In 1875, Deger was appointed marshal by the town council (there is some confusion in the popular mind, as a U.S. marshal is a federal employee, while a city marshal is essentially the police chief and is hired by local government. However, in some locations, marshals were elected — it’s all quite confusing. Sheriffs are usually politicians, who are elected). Deger was a saloon keeper and took sides in a developing confrontation among townspeople between those who wanted a more open town to provide booze and professional women to cattle drivers, i.e. “good for business,” and those who wanted a quieter, more civilized town. Deger wanted peace.
What ensued in 1873 is sometimes called the Saloon Wars and sometimes the Dodge City Wars. Deger was by that time mayor and had laws passed establishing prohibition and outlawing prostitution. It was also suggested, for instance, “We should have an ordinance prohibiting the firing of guns within the city limits.” And, “We should have a law not allowing the riding of horses over sidewalks and into the saloons.”
In the course of these reforms, three “singers” at the Long Branch saloon were arrested, but none of the workers at other saloons were also nabbed. Favoritism was charged and the pro-business group, called “the gang,” hired a bunch of former lawmen as muscle for their side of the argument.
Dodge City Peace Commission
A famous photo of the group was made at the time, with (standing L-R: William Harris; Luke Short; Bat Masterson; William Petillon. And seated, L-R: Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp; Frank McLean; and Neil Brown.)
The sides stared each other down, but it was finally resolved without gunfire, and the Long Branch was allowed to reopen. But women in the profession were moved south of the railroad to the “wrong side of the tracks.”
Varieties Dance Hall, Dodge City
Deger married German-born Etta Engleman in 1883, and moved to Texas where he operated a lumber company. He died in 1924.
Thomas McCarty, his wife, Sarah, and Sing Lee
McCarty was the town’s first civilian doctor and Ford County’s first coroner. He and his wife, Sarah, arrived in Dodge City in 1872, on their way further west, but stayed in town. He operated his surgery and partnered in a drug store with Herman Fringer and later opened his own, called City Drug Store.
City Drug Store, 1877
McCarty’s son, Claude, was reputedly the first legitimate baby born in Dodge City, and later also became a doctor and with his father opened the McCarty Hospital in 1905, remodeling the old four-story Central Hotel.
The doctor’s household included a servant named Sing Lee, who wore the traditional Chinese queue.
Dr. Thomas McCarty died in 1930, ten years after his wife Sarah. His son lived until 1950.
Chalkley Beeson
Chalk Beeson came to Dodge in 1874 with his wife, Ida. Soon, he received the Billiard Hall Saloon as payment for a debt and renamed it the Saratoga, one of the few that didn’t employ prostitutes. Instead, he featured a five-piece band, with himself as leader on the fiddle. In 1877, the Dodge City Times wrote, “It is a rare treat to drop in at the Saratoga upon Mr. Beeson, and listen to his last and best musical combination. Mr. Beeson is a thorough lover of good music, and by his skillful selection of good performers … draws crowds of attentive listeners.”
Dodge City Cow-Boy Band, Beeson in center with fiddle
In 1884, he expanded his band to form the Dodge City Cow-Boy Band and toured, including an appearance in the inaugural parade of President Benjamin Harrison in 1889.
Beeson was later elected sheriff of Ford County and in 1903, elected to the state legislature. He died in 1912 when he was kicked by his horse.
By the middle 1870s, there were a little over 1000 residents in Dodge City but 16 saloons. In addition to the Long Branch and the Saratoga were the Alamo, the Alhambra, the Crystal Palace, the Lone Star, the Oasis, Congress Hall and the Green Front. Some of them just one-room storefronts.
A reporter from the Hays City Sentinel wrote of Dodge City at the time, “The employment of many citizens is gambling. Her virtue is prostitution and her beverage is whisky.” On TV, the saloon girls share drinks with cowboys, but, as one writer put it, “Miss Kitty wasn’t selling chocolate bars.” We know the names of several of these hard-working women.
Sarah “Sadie” Ratzell was born in Philadelphia but grew up on a Kansas farm. When she was 18, she became a prostitute and lived with a Dodge City dance hall owner in the 1880s.
In July, 1881, she complained to then-Marshal Fred Singer about a man prowling around her home after dark. Singer found and shot 23-year-old Joseph McDonald hidden in a growth of sunflowers. A coroner’s inquest that followed notes “the latter raised his arm horizontally, as though in the act of firing. The marshal apprehended some danger from this movement, and not knowing whether the man had a pistol or not, raised his weapon and fired, the shot striking McDonald in the hand and passing into his right side, causing death in three hours.” Singer later resigned as marshal and opened saloon, which occupation he said was more financially rewarding.
Front Street with Long Branch Saloon, 1875
Squirrel Tooth Alice was born Mary Elizabeth Haley in 1855 in Texas. She was kidnapped by Comanches in 1864 and ransomed three years later. She ran away from home at 14 to become a dance-hall girl and prostitute. She hooked up with”Texas Billy” Thompson. In 1873, Thompson shot and killed the sheriff in Ellsworth, Kan., but escaped from jail and fled to Dodge City, where she took up her trade. Later the pair, by then married, moved to Colorado and later, Texas. She was known as Squirrel Tooth after a gap in her front teeth. She also kept pet prairie dogs on leash and collar. As Libby Thompson, she had nine children by several men, while running a brothel. She died in California in 1953 at the age of 97.
Rose Vastine was known as Timberline because she was 6”2’ and worked in Dodge City in the 1870s. According to one account, she was suicidal, and while later living in Creede, Colo., shot herself six times, but lived. “She made yet another attempt to shoot herself in the chest in 1893. ‘Medical attendants were at once summoned and the would-be suicide is in a fair way to recovery,’ said the newspaper.” Little else is known.
Dodge City, 1879
Celia Ann Blaylock was born in Iowa in 1850. When she was 18, she ran away from home and found her way, as Mattie Blaylock, to Dodge City, where she became a prostitute. In 1876, she took up with city deputy marshal Wyatt Earp and for six years lived as his common-law wife while maintaining her profession. She suffered from extreme migraines and became addicted to laudanum as a pain killer. She left Dodge City with him in 1879, going to New Mexico, and then to Tombstone, Ariz. Eventually Earp left her, and in 1888, she died from an overdose, ruled by the coroner as “suicide by opium poisoning.” She was 38.
Interior, Long Branch Saloon
The Long Branch has become the most famous, although there never was a Miss Kitty. It was established in 1874 and named for its owner’s hometown of Long Branch, N.J. It passed through several hands and in 1878, Beeson bought a share in it. He sold his portion in 1883 to Luke Short.
Zimmerman’s hardware store
Two years later, it burned down in a fire that destroyed much of Front Street, taking out in addition, Dog Kelley’s Opera House, Charles Heinz’s Delmonico restaurant, the York, Parker, Draper Mercantile Company, F.C. Zimmermann’s hardware store and even the first brick building in town, Robert Wright’s store, which held out long enough to retrieve a good deal of his merchandise before the building went. But, as the newspaper reported, “Some awful good whiskey was allowed to burn up.”
That fire, and a second, smaller one a month later, led the city council to establish a fire department and a city water works, with fire hydrants around the city.
Robert M. Wright and his book
There are many more citizens of Dodge back then, and I can’t include them all. One early resident (and later mayor — they all seem to have taken turns as mayor) was Robert Wright, who, in his old age, wrote a book called, Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital and the Great Southwest in The Days of The Wild Indian, the Buffalo, the Cowboy, Dance Halls, Gambling Halls, and Bad Men, published in 1913. It is loaded with familiar stories of the early times in Kansas, but also argues that it wasn’t as bad as all that. He tries to put a clean face on the popular image. (I have read it; let’s just say, Wright was not a graceful writer — it’s a tough slog). Wright dies two years after his book was published.
L-R: Margaret Walker; Dave Mather; Rev. Ormond Wright
Among the many people I have had to leave out of this blog entry are Margaret Walker, the town’s first schoolteacher; “Mysterious Dave” Mather, who owned the Opera House Saloon and was the survivor of one of the more famous gunfights in town; Rev. Ormond Wright, who presided over the first church built in Dodge, a non-denominational worship.
Dodge City, 1887, with Arkansas River
There were enough documented personalities from the early years of Dodge City, that a TV series could have been made without resorting to the fictions of Matt, Doc, and Kitty. (I mean no slight on Gunsmoke, which, especially in its early years did truly attempt to be more faithful to the spirit, if not the fact of its times, and was often extremely well written.)
Dodge City, 1890s
Dodge City went from tents and sod to wood frame buildings and to multi-story brick in a little over ten years, in the process building institutions, electing a town council and mayor, and hiring a police force, so that, when the cattle industry largely disappeared in the 1880s, it was prepared to be a self-sustaining community. The real town was a dynamic entity; on TV, it was just a stage set.
The foundational mythology of the United States belongs to the cowboy. An argument can be made for the Founding Fathers, but they are understood more as history than as myth. And by myth I don’t merely mean something that isn’t “true,” but as a mental model that we have absorbed as the definition of what makes us American. We are more John Wayne than we are John Adams.
Like many of us, I grew up on Westerns, although because I am in my 70s, my foundational Westerns were those from the 1930s recycled in the 1950s on television. I grew up knowing who Ken Maynard was, or Buck Jones. Back then, TV stations were starving for content to broadcast, and the pile of old Westerns filled the Saturday morning hunger. Those younger than me likely didn’t have such a cinematic indoctrination. Later TV Westerns became their version.
But, since I wrote a blog piece about TV’s Gunsmoke, (link here) I have been thinking about Westerns and their role as our national psychic subconscious, and about how the fictional version differed from the historical. And what is more, what that shift means, culturally.
It has not always meant the same thing, and the evolution over time describes the changes in America’s perception of itself.
I believe there were distinct eras of Westerns, that have evolved over the past two centuries. These versions of the West overlap, and all of them have been present from the beginning, or near enough. But the preponderance of each defines each era.
The West began in upstate New York with Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, as he was known in The Last of the Mohicans, and gave us the prototype of the rugged individualist. He morphed into Jim Bridger, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and various mountain men living in the wilderness.
Jim Bridger; Joseph Walker; Jim Baker; Jim Beckwourth
These heroes played out the myth of how we conquered a vast wilderness with rugged individualism and tenacity. It grew into the myth of Manifest Destiny.
After the Civil War, when economic exploitation of the West began in earnest, with mining and cattle industries, the cowboy took over, with adventurous exploits popularized in a thousand dime novels. Certain names begin showing up with regularity, including Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Belle Starr. These elided into the early Western movies, including The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Across the Plains (1911), which starred Broncho Billy Anderson, the first cowboy movie star.
And a split in the myth. On one hand, you had William S. Hart, who attempted a level or realism in costume and plot (matched with a high level of sentimentality), and on the other hand, you had Tom Mix, the show-biz cowboy all duded out with fancy kit.
The difference was between movies made for general audiences and those aimed at children, mainly young boys. Mix brought glamour to the Western, with fancy cowboy duds and sparkling saddlery to his horse, Tony.
That split continued into the sound era with hour-long Saturday matinees with Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele and dozens of others, including John Wayne, who made scores of cheap oaters and even took to trying out as one of the singing cowboys that were briefly popular.
Through the 1940s, the cowboy movie became stereotyped with stars such as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. There was little attempt at realism. Sometimes they actually fought Nazis.
These were the cowboys wearing shirts with crescent pockets and shoulder fringe, and often sported a six-gun on each hip.
All that carried over into the television era, with a skein of popular Westerns mostly aimed at kids: The Lone Ranger; The Cisco Kid; renewed popularity of Hopalong Cassidy.
Meanwhile, there were always Westerns made for grown-ups, too. From John Ford’s Stagecoach and Howard Hawks’ Red River, through the Budd Boetticher films with Randolph Scott. There was Shane, and High Noon, and Winchester ’73.
Initially, the lone hero version carried over into the TV era, also, when The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, with Hugh O’Brien, kicked off a decade of evening programing with cowboy heroes, such as Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun — Will Travel, Bat Masterson, and The Rifleman. And, of course, Gunsmoke. You can name a dozen others. The market became glutted and then, suddenly, it seems, Westerns were shot dead.
There came a cultural shift. Maybe it was the Vietnam War, maybe it was fatigue with the cowboy cliches, but when Westerns eventually did return to the silver screen, they took a dark turn. There had been revisionist Westerns before. Indians weren’t always the bad guys. But starting in the 1960s, with films such as Ride the High Country (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the subsequent Spaghetti Westerns, Hang’em High (1968) and ultimately, The Wild Bunch (1969), the new Western was brutal, filled with low-lifes and lots, and lots of grime.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”
The trend continued through McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) to Unforgiven (1992). Even the more positive films like those from Larry McMurtry novels or with Tom Selleck attempt a more naturalistic view of the times in which they were set.
Of course, there’s a good deal of overlap in the eras. It’s a question of what predominates in what decade. There have been revisionist Westerns from the earliest years, but this view of the overall shape of the Western in American consciousness over time is, I believe, basically accurate.
What is not accurate, though, are the Westerns themselves. Admittedly, they were never really intended as realism: They are myth and they are national epic. Our equivalent of the Iliad or the Kalevala. Even those attempting fidelity to historical fact ultimately underline the myth more than the fact. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Actual cowboys
As a kid, I loved the cowboy movies, but as an adult, I am bothered by them. I try to remember they are not meant to be documentaries, but crystallizations of myth, and you don’t expect myth to be realistic. You don’t ask Hercules if he has a mortgage.
Yet, there are sore thumbs that stick out for me in almost all filmed Westerns; four of them — aspects that scream out: “No, this isn’t the way it was.” And perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but these things make it difficult for me to appreciate Westerns the way I did when I was a kid.
I have four primary gripes. They are: economy; geography; ethnic diversity; and language. Let’s take them in order.
Two movies, same location
Towns exist in Western mainly to stand in for civilization. It’s where the people are — the people largely left undefined. They stand in front of general stores or the saloon while the heroes and villains play out the ritual of the gunfight. The same set can be used and reused in many pictures, even as diverse as Westworld and Blazing Saddles. The Western movie town is just the stage set for the plot.
But actual towns are built for economic reasons. There was some industry that needed workers and the workers needed services, and so, towns grew. But in most Western movies, there doesn’t seem to be any functioning economy. There are references to cattle and ranches, but aside from giving rustlers something to do, they barely show up as economic factors.
While the standard movie Western town has its saloons, its general store, its hotel and restaurant, its stable and blacksmith, there is never a thought to where its residents get the money to pay for their drinks, meals, gingham or horseshoes. A town doesn’t grow for just no reason.
Even Dodge City, in the 1870s, when Gunsmoke is supposedly set, had a mayor and council and a police force. There would also likely have been an elected sheriff for Ford County and a judge, to say nothing of at least two lawyers, advertising on the front page of the Dodge City Times in 1878.
Sometimes it is downright preposterous. Consider Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. Its town is built on Mono Lake in California with no economic base at all — just a hodgepodge of buildings erected near a salty lake that cannot even provide drinking water for the residents.
“High Plains Drifter”
Or, one of my favorites, the supposed farm built in Monument Valley in Arizona, in The Searchers. The idea of such a farm is ludicrous — not made better because the landscape is supposed to stand in for Texas.
“The Searchers”
Again, there is a reason towns were built where they were. On rivers for shipping; near mines to provide supplies and provisions; along railroads to ship cattle; near army forts to unload soldiers of their pay.
As seen in the movies
My second beef with Westerns is its geography. Most of the Western tales we have historically took place in the most boring landscapes imaginable, in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas.
What the actual working West looked like
But such places are not very photogenic. And so, we move them lock, stock and barrel to the Rocky Mountains, the Desert Southwest or California’s Alabama Hills with the Sierra Nevada in the background.
“Gunsmoke”
Even Gunsmoke, set in Kansas, sometimes shows a mountain range off in the distance sighted down the main street. (I’ll discuss Dodge City in more detail in Part 2 of this essay, to follow). Matt Dillon is sometimes shown accompanying a prisoner, for instance, across the Rocky Mountains or into the desert, hundreds of miles from his jurisdiction. To say nothing of the months it would take to ride there on the back of a horse.
In the 1950 film Broken Arrow, Jimmy Stewart rush back from Lordsburg, N.M., to Tucson, Ariz., and somehow manages to pass through Sedona, Ariz., on the way — a detour of several hundred miles. Clearly Sedona was more photogenic than the Wilcox Playa or Benson.
Wilcox Playa (left); Sedona, Ariz. (right)
As in so many Westerns, the West is just a mental landscape, where any buttes and saguaro cactus will do as a setting.
As a sidenote, related to the geography: Cowboys stranded in the desert reach for their canteen and take a slug of water, or else hold it upside down so we can see it’s empty. I lived in the desert for 25 years and can tell you water is a big deal. Driving through Death Valley one July, I became so dehydrated I developed a headache and was beginning to become disoriented. I had to drink a full gallon of water to recover. A few swigs from a canteen is basically meaningless.
The third and fourth distortions are perhaps less important, but they nevertheless stick out for me when I’m watching an old Western. There is the lack of ethnic diversity and the matter of speech.
Cowboys: Vanilla, Native American; African American
It’s been documented that about a quarter of all cowboys were African-American. They don’t much show up in the movies (John Ford had his Woody Stroud and at least that was a nod to the fact). And another 20 percent were Mexican and many were Native American. In the towns, segregation was normal, even if the working cowboys out on the plains were mixed. Virtually all the laundries and restaurants in the Old West were run by Asians, mostly Chinese. Other ethnicities were notable factors in various troubles, as the Irish clashed with the English.
Finally, there is the language spoken in 19th century America, which was much more formal than we take for normal now. In the Western movies, the actors tend to speak in the manner current when the films were made, and that changes over time, just the way the hats went from 10 gallons to three pints, and the brassieres just kept getting pointier.
The evidence from letters and from novels written during the period tell us that people spoke in longer sentences with fewer contractions. At home, you might relax when talking to your spouse or children, but in public, you attempted to be correct. Even the illiterate miners and farmers spoke more formally.
This last bothers me less, because if Randolph Scott or John Wayne spoke as they would have in the Old West, the audience might laugh, or at least yawn. How often have you heard parodies of Ken Burns’ Civil War, when they read letters soldiers wrote home? What was normal speech in the 1870s sounds utterly archaic, even stilted, to our ears.
Next: Part 2 — A look at the historical Dodge City
Richard Nilsen 