Rollin’, Rollin’, Respectin’ Along the Western Trail
From Bandera, Texas, to Ogallala, Nebraska.
By: Johnny D. Boggs 08/01/2009
Oklahoma and Kansas
Here’s an obstacle Vernon’s Western Trail Heritage Center might face. Clinton once was home of the Western Trail Museum. Today, it’s home instead to the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum. Seems that tourists just weren’t stampeding to see a Western Trail museum, so the brass decided to honor another “mother road.” Maybe if I could just persuade that great road storyteller, Michael Wallis, to write a book about the Western Trail, all would be saved.
Michael has written about Route 66, the Lincoln Highway, the 101 Ranch, Billy the Kid and Pretty Boy Floyd. A Western Trail history would be natural. Mike, you can save this trail! Make a pitch! No publisher can say “no!” to the Sheriff from the Pixar movie Cars.
Well, no matter. The Oklahoma Route 66 Museum is still a good place to get your kicks before lighting out for Fort Supply to visit Fort Supply Historic Site, run by the Oklahoma Historical Society (check out Cavalry Day on September 19). Then push on north to Dodge City, Kansas.
You know Dodge, of course. It’s the Queen of the Cowtowns, Kansas’s version of Sin City. Home of Wyatt Earp and Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty. It’s a town that still smells like a cowtown, and if you can make it to the Boot Hill Museum without getting smashed by a big-rig truck, you deserve a cold one at the Long Branch Saloon.
Actually, Dodge City is charming and a lot of fun. It’s cultural (Depot Theater Company). It’s cowboy (Dodge City Roundup Rodeo). It’s historic (Mueller-Schmidt Home of Stone). And it’s kitsch (Gunfighters Wax Museum). It’s even bridle bits (Bridle Bit Museum ... that’s right, a collection of historic bridle bits, open by appointment).
I always hate to get the hell out of Dodge.
Trail to Ogallala
Yet I must make my way to another great cowtown on the Western Trail; Ogallala also doesn’t get enough respect.
The Gateway of the Northern Plains was cowtown king from the 1870s until the mid-1880s. In fiction, Gus and Call came through Ogallala in Lonesome Dove. In nonfiction, it was home to Tuck’s Saloon and other fine watering holes. “From amongst its half hundred buildings, no church spire pointed upward,” Andy Adams wrote in 1903’s Log of a Cowboy, “but instead, three fourths of its business houses were dance halls, gambling houses, and saloons.”
The cowtown’s Boot Hill isn’t quite the “Gomorrah of the cattle trail” today, like Adams called it, but it is definitely a hill, and it is as fine a historic boneyard as you are apt to find in western Nebraska.
Post A Comment