Customer Reviews

Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns

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Stanley Vestal is a good writer when it comes to anecdotal history. The yarns he spins are interesting, and often quite amusing. This book, written in 1952, is not as dated as one might think. One will recognize differences in word choice (political correctness), but overall, this book is a good choice for someone who is not interested in a chronological history of Dodge City, but wants a highly readable book of anecdotes that tell the history of Dodge City. As an additional note, Vestal goes to great pains to disprove many of the myths that popular TV shows and nickel westerns have brought forth about the West, especially Dodge City. Vestal's view of Dodge is not from Gunsmoke! To anyone who is interested in the real story, this is particularly heartening.

Dodge City got a reputation for being "the wickedest town in the west," though on closer examination this seems a great exaggeration. It probably was no wilder than many other cattle towns along the westward expanding railroads, and there were no doubt a handful of western mining camps that would far surpass it in unlawfulness. Only one man was wounded, none killed, between its two most famous marshals, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Stanley Vestal has written an entertaining popular history of the town that is for the most part accurate, but more to his purpose, gives a good "feel" for what Dodge was like in its heyday.

Located just west of old Fort Dodge, the town had its beginnings when the Santa Fe Railroad built through the area in 1872. At first buffalo hides were the main items sent east, but after cattle pens were constructed, herds being driven north from Texas made Dodge City their destination point. By 1877, Dodge was the major shipping center along the Santa Fe Railroad, with nearly 23,000 head shipped east. The combination of soldiers, cowboys, lots of money, and many hangers-on following the railroad west made for a rough and unsettled environment. Vestal relates information about the hide hunters, gamblers, train robbers, cowboys and cattle, the famous Boot Hill cemetery, horse thieves, Earp and Masterson, and many other legends, usually in an anecdotal manner. Like all the cattle towns, however, when settlers began arriving, the cattle interests were forced to bend to agricultural concerns; this happened to Dodge by 1884. By then the town was fairly "civilized," though its reputation for wildness lived on (revived in the 20th century thanks to Gunsmoke).

A major criticism leveled at the book is Vestal's relying on Stuart Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp for most of his information regarding the lawman. Much of Lake's information has been proven to be false, given to him by Earp himself. A criticism that I have is that there is no Index. But if you're interested in a general, mostly factual (though not technically historical), and entertaining account of the Queen of the Cowtowns (so named because it was the main shipping center along the Santa Fe), Vestal's book is just the ticket.

This book is everything I hoped it would be, I would recommend it as readable to the casual western historian, written in even flowing style, ...Vestal is one of the great writers of the west. Interesting, rivoting, much better than most books on the west!

This book is nothing more than a rehash of Stuart N. Lake's book on Wyatt Earp. Vestal has got Earp carrying the Buntline Special, walking on water and leaping tall buildings. This book would be fine along side a Zane Gray novel.