Which wasn’t much of an exaggeration when the Running W Trail herd rolled up to town. The “Cowboy Capital” was at the height of its prosperity. When George Hoover and Jack Mc-Donald pitched a tent on the site of the future cowtown, from which they sold whiskey to Fort Dodge soldiers, it is doubtful if they in the least envisioned what the future was to bring. Harry Lovett put up a second canvas saloon, and a gentleman with more elaborate notions, one Henry Sitler, built a sod house. This growing metropolis was called Buffalo City until the following spring brought railroad construction gangs. The railroaders mapped a town on the north side of the Arkansas River, five miles west of the fort. Very quickly, the ruts of the old Santa Fe Trail saw a general store and ware house, three dancehalls and a half dozen saloons come into being. Dodge City was substituted for the really more descriptive “Buffalo City.” Here at the end of steel— where the Santa Fe was pushing south to the Rio Grande—swiftly boomed a roaring, hell-raising, gun-smoking frontier town, the equal of which the nation was never to see again.
