The Rise and Fall of America's Most Lawless City: Dodge City, Kansas

Forget the Westerns. This Is How America's Most Notorious Cowtown Really Rose and Fell. In 1872, a whiskey stand appeared five miles past an army fort on the Kansas prairie. Within a decade, Dodge City was the most notorious town in America, a place of hide yards, cattle herds, saloons, and famous lawmen. But the town's own records tell a stranger story than the Hollywood legend. Discover how Dodge City really worked, who profited, and what finally brought its wild years to an end. Sources and Further Reading Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra, Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West (University Press of Kansas, 2017) Robert M. Wright, Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital and the Great Southwest (1913) Richard Irving Dodge, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (1877) C. Robert Haywood, The Merchant Prince of Dodge City: The Life and Times of Robert M. Wright (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) Odie B. Faulk, Dodge City: The Most Western Town of All (Oxford University Press, 1977) Nyle H. Miller and Joseph W. Snell, Why the West Was Wild (Kansas State Historical Society, 1963) Tom Clavin, Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West (St. Martin's Press, 2017) Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, entries "Dodge City, Kansas" and "Cattle Towns" by Robert R. Dykstra Kansas Historical Society, Kansas Memory collection and the Dodge City Times and Ford County Globe newspaper archives About This Channel This video is made for educational and informative purposes. Our goal is to widen our viewers' knowledge of American frontier history and give them valuable content grounded in real historical sources. Every script on this channel is researched and written by a human writer, and all visuals and storyboards are brainstormed and developed internally by our team.