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    • April 5, 1873: Ford County Is Organized
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      • Dodge City
        • The Bull Fight at Dodge
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        • Dodge City Shootout: The Deaths of Levi Richason and Frank Loving
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        • Spearville, Kansas – City of Windmills
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        • Colonel Richard Dodge on Blizzards While at Fort Dodge, Kansas
        • Fort Dodge (Ida Ellen Rath)
        • Fort Dodge Provides Reason for Dodge City’s Founding
        • Kansas Soldiers’ Home – 4th of July, 1890
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  • Books
    • DODGE CITY, the COWBOY CAPITAL
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Introduction
      • Chapter I. The Country, Time, and Conditions that Brought About Dodge City
      • Chapter II. Travel on Old Trails
      • Chapter III. Ranching in Early Days
      • Chapter IV. The Greatest Game Country on Earth
      • Chapter V. Indian Life of the Plains
      • Chapter VI. Wild Days with the Soldiers
      • Chapter VII. The Beginnings of Dodge City
      • Chapter VIII. Populating Boot Hill
      • Chapter IX. The Administration of Justice on the Frontier
      • Chapter X. The Passing of the Buffalo
      • Chapter XI. Joking with Powder and Ball
      • Chapter XII. When Conviviality Was the Fashion and the Rule
      • Chapter XIII. Resorts Other than Saloons, and Pastimes Other than Drinking
      • Chapter XIV. Where the Swindler Flourished and Grew Fat
      • Chapter XV. The Cattle Business and the Texas Drive
      • Chapter XVI. Distinguished Sojourners at Fort Dodge and Dodge City
      • Chapter XVII. The Great Decline and Subsequent Revival
      • Appendix
    • Early Ford County
      • Table of Contents
      • Acknowledgement
      • Preface
      • Foreword
      • CHAPTER ONE Peketon County Later Ford
      • CHAPTER TWO Along the Santa Fe Trail
      • CHAPTER THREE Dodge City Town Company
      • CHAPTER FOUR Dodge City and Other Towns
      • CHAPTER FIVE Organization of Ford County
      • CHAPTER SIX Buffalo Gold
      • CHAPTER SEVEN Indian Chief’s Narrow Escape
      • CHAPTER EIGHT Adobe Walls Fight
      • CHAPTER NINE Toll Bridge Gateway to the Southwest
      • CHAPTER TEN The Buffalo Trade
      • CHAPTER ELEVEN Cattle Men and Drives
      • CHAPTER TWELVE Men Who Made the West
      • CHAPTER THIRTEEN Dodge City Represented Ford County
      • CHAPTER FOURTEEN Newspapers in Ford County
      • CHAPTER FIFTEEN Business and Professional Men
      • CHAPTER SIXTEEN Early Day Men and a Diary
      • CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Dodge City a Sporting Town
      • CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Court House His Monument
      • CHAPTER NINETEEN A Good Place to Get a Start
      • CHAPTER TWENTY Herder Wagonmaster Lose Lives
      • CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Along the Sawlog
      • CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Tales of Early Day Youth
      • CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Dodge City Today Yesteryear
    • The Rath Trail
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: Quite a Start in Life
      • Chapter 2: Indian Alliance
      • Chapter 3: Indian Depredations
      • Chapter 4: An Act of Bravery Saves Two Lives
      • Chapter 5: Among the Comanches
      • Chapter 6: Indian Depredation Case
      • Chapter 7: A Brave Man on the Plains
      • Chapter 8: The Railroad Builds Westward
      • Chapter 9: The Men Who Returned
      • Chapter 10: The Buffalo Trade
      • Chapter 11: Cowboy Capital
      • Chapter 12: Indian Chief’s Peril
      • Chapter 13: Adobe Wall Trading Post
      • Chapter 14: Adobe Walls Fight
      • Chapter 15: Indian Depredation Loss
      • Chapter 16: Lone Tree Massacre
      • Chapter 17: Fort Griffin and the Flats
      • Chapter 18: Where the Rath Trail Led
      • Chapter 19: A Time of Change
      • Chapter 20: Rath City Evacuated
      • Chapter 21: Rath’s Freight Trains
      • Chapter 22: The Bull Fight
      • Chapter 23: End of the Trail
      • Illustrations
  • Collections
    • C. Robert Haywood Collection
      • Black Cowboy Influence on Racial Prejudice: Dodge City and Hodgeman Colony
      • Cowtown Courts
      • The Dodge City War
      • The Jones and Plummer Trail
      • Unplighted Troths: Causes for Divorce in a Frontier Town During the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century
  • People
    • Hamilton Butler Bell
    • Ida Ellen Cox [Rath]
    • Dr. Samuel Jay Crumbine
    • Wyatt Earp
      • “Calling the Turn”
      • Wyatt Barry Staap Earp’s Activities in Dodge City, KS
      • “Wyatt Earp Back in Town”
      • Wyatt Earp Deposition
      • Wyatt Earp Family History
      • Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal
    • “Big Nose” Kate Elder
    • Ben Hodges
    • John Henry “Doc” Holliday, D.D.S.
    • George Merritt Hoover
    • John Mueller
    • Frederick Carl Zimmermann
  • Projects
    • Coronado Cross
    • Dodge City Trail of Fame
    • Dust Bowl Oral History Project
      • Fort Dodge
      • Betty Cobb Braddock
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      • Lola Adams Crum
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      • Arthur W. Leonard
      • Floyd Russell Olson
      • Louis Sanchez
      • Irene Thompson
      • Juanita Wells
      • Elmer Wetzel
      • James A. “Jim” Williams
      • Project Credits
    • Ford County Legacy Center
    • Fort Dodge
    • Historic Cemetery Tour
    • Home of Stone Museum – Mueller-Schmidt House
      • Mueller-Schmidt House History
    • Landmark Arts Project
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    • The History of The Ford County Historical Society 1931 – 1991
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Fort Dodge (Ida Ellen Rath)

(from Early Ford County, by Ida Ellen Rath, 1964, FCHS, All Rights Reserved)

Fort Dodge [named for Brigadier General Grenville M. Dodge] was one of the most important forts on the western frontier. It was located to the east of the Caches and [present] Dodge City site in 1864, being an old camping ground for wagon trains going to New Mexico.

A Colorado regiment [under Colonel James H. Ford] was camped there before the establishment of the fort, which lay on the north bank of the Arkansas River and was in the shape of a half circle. Close to the river was a clay bank about twelve feet high. There the soldiers were quartered in dugouts with port-holes all around. [According to the Dodge City Daily Globe, Sept. 10, 1930, “Seventy of these, each ten by twelve feet, were sunk in the river bank to a depth of four to five feet…. By 1870, wooden bunks were provided.”] The officers were quartered in sod houses inside the enclosure. It was a four company post and in later years the government had ten men and a sargeant stationed at Robert Wright’s ranch on escort duty to protect the mail. On the east side of the Fort Dodge enclosure was a large gate. [The fort opened in 1865.]

The need for a fort at this location was great; an unusually large camp site for the fort was situated where the dry route and the wet route [of the Santa Fe Trail]… intersected. The dry route came across the divide from Larned on the Pawnee [river], while the wet route followed the river…. The dry route, often called the Hornado de Muerti, the journey of death, was often without water the whole distance and trains would lay up to recruit after making the passage, which caused that point on the Arkansas River to become a great camping site. When the Indians found this out, they made it one of their haunts to pounce down on the unwary emigrant and freighter.

 …General [Philip H.] Sheridan first came to Fort Dodge in the summer of 1868. He pitched his camp on the hill north of the fort and started fitting out his command against the Indians. The last visit General Sheridan made to the fort was in 1872 and he brought his whole staff with him…

In the fall of 1868, General Alfred Sully took command at the fort and fitted out an expedition for a winter campaign against the plains Indians. When the preparations for the expedition were well under way and his army practically ready to march, General…Sully was sent home and General [George A.] Custer carried on the campaign.

The abandonment of Fort Dodge in June, 1882, created surprise among the Dodge City people generally and they feared Indian raids. The troops stationed at Fort Dodge were sent, one company each to Fort Reno, Fort Supply, and to Fort Elliott, Texas, where they could be near the Indian reservation.

After its abandonment, part of the buildings were demolished, some removed. Later when rebuilding and repairing began and the establishment of the Soldiers’ Home became a reality, the character of the famous old post was sustained. Many of the old battle-scarred stone buildings are yet in use, situated in beautifully landscaped grounds. …A resolution was introduced in the Kansas legislature [by George M. Hoover] asking congress to cede the Fort Dodge military reservation for the Soldiers’ Home….[On March 2, 1889, Congress passed an act authorizing the land transfer. It opened January 1, 1890.]

… May [31], 1886, a sudden rush for settlement, on Fort Dodge [12,000 acres] reservation was made, early one Monday morning, and a hundred claims were staked off, between Sunday midnight and Monday morning before sunrise. No one seemed to know how the reservation was thrown upon the market all of a sudden and no one stopped to inquire but went right along with settling and improving some portion of the reservation, regardless of what the outcome might be. In fact, people were perfectly wild with excitement occasioned by this mysterious move. But the land was really opened to settlement, on terms prescribed by the government, by purchase and priority in settlement.

[Ida Ellen Rath, was the daughter-in-law of Charles Rath, early buffalo hunter and pioneer. Much of this excerpt was adapted by Rath from Robert Wright’s Dodge City, The Cowboy Capital, 1913, still the best book on the period.]

(© 2002, Ford County Historical Society, Inc., Rath Collection)

Sundaes on Sunday

June 15, 2025 - 2 - 4 PM

home of stone museum

112 E Vine St - Dodge City, Kansas

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