Dodge City, the one-time "Wickedest Little City in America," turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. Dodge City was once the epitome of the Wild West, famous for lawlessness and gunslinging, saloons, and "soiled doves," and it was where buffalo hunters, cowpokes, railroad workers, drifters, and soldiers scrapped and fought. This lead to the shootings where men died with their boots on and created the hasty need for a local burial place-Boot Hill Cemetery. Dodge is also known for tough men like Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Charlie Bassett who brought order to the frontier town, and it was the home of fictional lawman Marshal Matt Dillon in the Gunsmoke radio and TV series. But it has become almost completely anonymous as just another modest-size (slightly over 26,000 residents per the 2000 census) town in the middle of nowhere. Nothing of the original town still exists, though there is a reconstructed Front Street faade in front of what's left of Boot Hill (the top of which was leveled long ago, and a school now rests on the flattened summit) in downtown Dodge. The Boot Hill Museum occupies this Front Street fascia, and, while filled with some very cool relics, it was dusty and felt quite lifeless. Perhaps it would have been better to visit during the tourist season. We did, however, see (and buy) a souvenir that has to be the most hilarious and questionably tasteless item we saw during the entire trip-a silkscreened T-shirt celebrating Dodge City's annual Bull Fry. Let's just say they ain't barbequing ribs; the parts that get fried are what separate bulls from steers. Maybe a wee bit of the spirit of the old Dodge City does still exist.
Looking for more historical satisfaction, we headed to nearby Fort Dodge, which preceded the town and, like Fort Larned, was entrusted with guarding the Santa Fe Trail. But we found that it had far less going for it nowadays than the Fort Larned Historical Site seemed to; so we decided to get the hell outta Dodge (sorry, just had to say it!), taking SR 50 west-northwest towards Pueblo, Colorado. Since we had been unable so far to indulge in too much cowboy history, perhaps we'd have better luck with the Indians, and thought to visit some of the Anasazi ruins and cliff dwellings around southwestern Colorado. We somewhat arbitrarily decided to head to Pueblo, Colorado, and determine the rest of the trip from there.
The southwestern part of Kansas, for the most part, is wide-open, mostly flat grasslands, making for pleasant, if not exciting, scenery. The downside, however, were the cattle-feed lots and rendering plants scattered throughout the area. Now, Southern and Central California has its share of dairy farms and the like, but familiarity with the pungent aromas wafting around from a giant pile of fertilizer in no way prepares one for the foul stench that a rendering plant creates. The rank smell hung in the air over much of the next couple hundred miles, following us into eastern Colorado. Grain elevators also dotted the Kansas landscape, and, while we made pretty good time overall, we'd have to slow from our somewhat extra-legal cruising speeds down to 25 mph as we crept past a massive elevator and the two blocks of "town" surrounding it, then resume cruising for another few miles before the next one. Some of the larger small towns we passed through looked like nostalgic time capsules from a simpler time. One point of interest, just south of Garden City (which with a population of over 28,000 is the largest community in southwest Kansas), is the 4,000-acre Finney Game Preserve, home to a large herd of bison. Tours are by reservation only, so we skipped seeing that particular remnant of the Old West.
 La Junta, CO. With a name...  La Junta, CO. With a name like that, we had to try it. The steaks and beers were pretty good. |  Highway 350, between La Junta...  Highway 350, between La Junta and Trinidad, CO. |  Looking west from Highway...  Looking west from Highway 350 near Trinidad. |
 Looking south from the crest...  Looking south from the crest of Raton Pass, elevation 7,834 feet, on the Colorado/New Mexico border. |  Driving southwest on Highway...  Driving southwest on Highway 350 in southeastern CO, somewhere in the Comanche National Grassland. |  Highway 350, about two-thirds...  Highway 350, about two-thirds of the way from La Junta to Trinidad. These historical markers are just a few feet from a section of plains that is still deeply scarred by the ruts of thousands of oxen-drawn wagons that passed this spot from the 1830s into the 1870s. |