Thursday, August 25th we headed out after lunch to do some exploring and geocaching in Dodge City. The basic history of Dodge City is pretty well known, with lots of books, movies and television shows centered around the town. Dodge City can really trace it roots back to the early 1800's and the Santa Fe Trail, a travel and trade route which linked the State of Missouri with the city of Santa Fe in the Western territory. Because the route went though Indian territory,
the Army built a series of forts along the trail to help protect travelers. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, the Army established Fort Dodge not too far from the Arkansas River. A few years later, in 1872, settlers to the area laid out a town about five miles West of the fort, which they aptly named Dodge City. This was same time that the Santa Fe Railroad was pushed through to the new town. Because of a variety of quarantine actions by the Kansas State government, the routes used to move cattle from Texas up into Kansas and Missouri for slaughter were pushed West. Around 1876 the new town of Dodge City suddenly found itself the Queen of the Cow Towns.
South of the tracks, hastily built frame buildings and tents housed two grocery and general merchandise stores, a dance hall, a restaurant, a barber shop, a blacksmith shop and a saloon. The famous Front Street legend had begun. During those early years, Dodge City also acquired it’s infamous stamp of lawlessness and gun-slinging. There was no local law enforcement and the military had no jurisdiction over the town. Buffalo hunters, railroad workers, drifters and soldiers scrapped and fought, leading to the shootings where men died with their boots on. That created a hasty need for a local burial place, Boot Hill Cemetery. The cemetery is now a part of downtown Dodge City. It was used only until 1878.
Dodge City was the Buffalo capital of the country for three years until mass slaughter destroyed the huge herds and left the Prairie littered with decaying carcasses. An estimated 850,000 Buffalo hides were shipped from Dodge City in the years 1872-1874.
Law and order in Dodge came in the form of such now famous names as Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman and Charlie Bassett. Out of these personalities evolved the famous fictional character of Marshal Matt Dillon. The town these early men knew was laid out with two Front Streets, one on either side of the railroad tracks. The city passed an ordinance that guns could not be worn or carried north of the "deadline" which was the railroad tracks. The south side where "anything went" was wide open. In 1876 the population was 1,200 and nineteen businesses were licensed to sell liquor. The Long Branch Saloon, made famous in the legendary television series “Gunsmoke” really existed in Dodge City. Fort Dodge was closed in 1882 and by 1886, the cattle drives had ended. Wyatt Earp and his brothers moved to Tombstone and their famous date with destiny there, Bat Masterson moved East and became a writer. Dodge City settled down into a typical Kansas prairie town with farming and cattle ranching as the primary economic drivers. However, it never forgot it’s past and there are monuments and parks all over town keeping the names and places of the past alive.
We did our geocaching around town first so as to avoid the worst heat of the day. We had pretty good luck, finding a total of twelve new caches, with one new DNF, in the course of about two and one half hours. We also found a couple new travel bugs, which seem to have been far and few between the last few weeks. One of the caches was in the Visitors Center downtown, where we gathered some information on the area, including some of the history outlined above. Another of the caches was pretty cute and easy to find, just hard to get to. It was a standard rural mailbox on a ten foot pole outside a hanger at the local airport. The cache was a container inside the mailbox. There was a stick with a hook on it conveniently located nearby. The cache was a play on some novelty mailboxes we have seen other places in the country. People put a box on a tall pole and then put a sign on it that says, “air mail.” Pretty cute.
After we got our twelve finds we quit caching and did some sightseeing in the area. We stopped at the Boot Hill Museum, thinking it was a city run operation. Turns out that the original Boot Hill in downtown Dodge is privately owned and they have built their own museum and gift shop. They also built a replica of what Front Street might have looked like in the late 1800's, including
the Long Branch Saloon. Unfortunately, they wanted $10 a head to tour their “museum” so we didn’t take them up on it. We also drove for about an hour on various streets in town, looking at old houses and buildings and just getting a feel for the town. Very nice little place. Currently Dodge City has a population of about 30,000 and meat packing and support for local farming and ranching are the primary economic forces. After our caching we went back to the coach and relaxed the rest of the day.
Friday, August 26th, we left the coach after lunch to do some more geocaching. Our first stop was a virtual cache (no actual cache container) located at a roadside historical monument. I walked out on the path and was able to see some of the remains of the actual tracks from the Santa Fe Trail, left by the wagons traveling West over 150 years ago. Pretty impressive.
We spent the afternoon working on caches located in outlying areas and found a total of ten new caches with two DNFs. In our caching we visited Montezuma, primarily a farming community, but also host to a wind farm, an area where about 170 windmills are located generating power. Small by the standards of someone from the Palm Springs area like us, where thousands of windmills are working.
After our caching we visited the original site of Fort Dodge, which is now the Kansas Soldier’s Home. There are a whole bunch of small bungalows along with several buildings that appear to be dormitories. There is also a VA clinic on the site. Looks like Kansas really cares about it’s veterans. We also paid a visit to the Boot Hill casino, locate on Highway 50, not too far from our RV park. Boot Hill is apparently where money goes to die, because our $20 donations didn’t last long. Oh, well. After the casino visit we headed for the coach where we stayed the rest of the day.
No Elks or Moose lodges in Dodge. Kansas has very strict liquor laws and was the last state to eliminate prohibition, waiting until 1948. Even now there are dozens of dry counties and most of the rest have restrictions that on-sale service, buying drinks to consume on the premises, can only be in an establishement where at least 30 percent of the revenue is from food. Basically this means there can be no true “bar’ or cocktail lounge that is not a restaurant. There are only a handful of counties, mostly around the big cities like Wichita and Kansas City, that allow regular bars. The county we are in is Ford County and it has the food restriction, so there are no bars. There can’t be bars in private clubs like Elks or Moose.
As we pulled into the driveway by our coach this afternoon the thermometer in the car showed 107 degrees, this was about 4:30. When we watched the local news we noticed that this broke the all time number of days over 100 degrees in Dodge City for one season. The previous record was 40 days from sometime back in the 1930's.
Basically, Oklahoma, Kansas and North Texas are getting more heat than they did during the dust bowl days of the 30's. Things are looking bleak in this area. As we drive around we see thousands of acres of corn and feed looking brown and stunted. We can see food prices spiking in the next few months as a result of the extreme heat and drought in this area. This has been an eye opening visit with regard to what these farmers and ranchers are going through. Good thing there are lots of churches around. These plains folks are certainly church goers. Our tour through Dodge City revealed dozens of churches. There were times when we could see five or six different churches from one place on the road.
Saturday, August 27th is moving day again. Time to get the Hell out of Dodge. Originally, I wanted to head North through Kansas to a town not too far from the Nebraska border named Lebanon. Not too far from Lebanon is a marker put out in 1918 by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the predecessor agency to the current National Geodetic Survey. This marker is supposed to represent what they determined to be the exact geographic center of the lower 48 states, which, of course, WAS the United States in 1918 since Alaska and Hawaii didn’t come along until 1959. I just thought it would be neat to stand exactly in the center of the country.
Unfortunately, when I started looking for RV parks in North central Kansas I found nothing. No RV parks anywhere close to Lebanon that I could find. Since we would be going a couple hundred miles out of our way to get there, I didn’t want to take a chance on finding a place to park. It just wasn’t that important a deal. Bottom line, we decided to just head West, back into Colorado and take a more direct route to our next reservation destination, Loveland, Colorado, North of Denver. We have had these reservations for several months. We need to be in Loveland on September 2nd. So, we left Dodge City about 9:30 and headed West on U.S. 50 to Lamar, Colorado, about 150 miles away. En route we time traveled,
crossing into Mountain Time just before exiting Kansas. We arrived at the Country Acres RV park about 11:30, local time, and got set up for a five day stay. This is a Passport America park and we got in for $17 a night. Since we don’t really have any special place to be between now and September 2nd, we decided to go cheap and just stay here for most of the six day gap. We will stop at a KOA halfway between here and Loveland on Thursday for just one night. KOA’s are just too damn expensive to spent a lot of time there.
This park is a little rugged, not quite as much as Alice’s down in Hooker, but very basic. We did get a 50 amp site with full hookups, so we will be happy here. We will cache a couple of days and relax the rest of the time. Got a few chores to be done with the coach anyway. It was hot here, in the high 90's, but cooler than Dodge City. The weather showed that it would be six or seven degrees cooler here than in Dodge, so it should be comfortable. Once we got the coach set up and settled in we just stayed in the rest of the day.
Now for your history lesson. Lamar was one of the way stations on the Santa Fe Trail for a long time. After abandoning his first site about 50 miles West, William Bent built his second trading post several miles west of what is now Lamar in 1853. This was the area of "Big Timbers," a thick belt of giant cottonwoods that extended up the Arkansas river almost 40 miles.
As a town, Lamar was founded by speculators who reasoned they needed a federal land office and a railroad depot to ensure their venture's success. So they named the town "Lamar" after the sitting secretary of the interior, Lucius Lamar and he granted them the land office. One interesting story I found in my research related to the town’s first railroad depot. The town “fathers” actually stole it from a cattleman who lived 3 miles out of town. He had built the depot as a way to easily get his cattle onto the trains. The mayor of Lamar had the rancher summoned to Pueblo, the largest nearby city and the center of commerce for Southern Colorado. While the rancher was gone, the city fathers hauled his railroad depot into their townsite. On May 24, 1886, lots went on sale and before the week was out, several saloons and real estate agencies had set up shop and were doing business. Evidently the rancher didn’t make too much of a stink about his depot. By December, 1886, stores, schools, a church and a newspaper were in operation and the town's population reached 1,000.
Today Lamar has a population of about 10,000 and is primarily a support and transportation center for local farming and ranching. In 1983 Neoplan, a manufacturer of transit buses, built a plant here and also had its headquarters here. However, the company went bankrupt in 2006 and the plant is closed.
Sunday, August 28th we decided to pretty much stay in for the day. We got off to a bit of a rough start when I woke up just before 5:00 a.m. and noticed that the outside power was off. Our inverter was keeping most of the stuff inside operating, but it was pulling the batteries down. I wasn’t sure how long it had been off. I fell asleep about midnight after the band that was playing in the courtyard of the RV park quit. They were having some sort of community fund raiser party and had quite a crowd. The band was good and I enjoyed laying in bed listening through the open window.
Anyway, I went outside and noticed that my surge protector, connected between the coach and the power pedestal, showed that one leg of the 50 amp circuit was out. I reset the breakers, but it still showed one of the two legs dead. I got the adapter for plugging into 30 amp service and plugged the coach into the 30 amp receptacle and we had power, so I went back in and back to bed. In the morning I went to the office and told them about the problem. Within a half hour the owner showed up and between he, his son and I we managed to replace the breakers on the 50 amp receptacle. That was the problem, one of the breakers had burned out. New breaker and we had our 50 amps back. That is good because it’s supposed to be hot for the rest of the time we are here and with 30 amps we can only run one A/C. With the 50 we can run both. Yea.
We did go out briefly after lunch for a quick Walmart run. While we were in the car the thermometer showed the temperature to be over 100. Other than that, we just stayed in the coach and relaxed for the entire day.
Monday, August 29th, we decided that this would be a good day for caching since it was supposed to be much cooler than it has been for the last week or so. We left the house after lunch and started our caching right in Lamar, and then started East on U.S. 50 caching along the way. As with most rural and small town areas, the caches were spread out over a long way. We actually ended up back in Kansas where we did two caches before going back West to Lamar. I think we ended up driving over 100 miles today, but in the process we got 17 new finds with no DNFs and our last find was number 2,800. Yea, another milestone.
Two interesting things from our caching day. Of our 17 finds, seven were cemetery caches from a series called “Colorado Spirit Quest.” We have done spirit quest caches before, I recall some from back in Minnesota and Iowa back in 2008. Fortunately for us, all of the spirit quest caches today were pretty quick and easy finds. We also did a virtual cache, and actually one
of the spirt quest caches, inside the grounds where the ruins of Camp Amache are preserved. The virtual asked for some information off of a sign at the entrance to the ruins. It was a wooden sign with a map of the camp carved on it. The original map had been drawn by a Japanese high school student who was in the camp during the war. It was later copied to the sign by some high school kids in Lamar that are helping to preserve the ruins.
Camp Amache, originally called the Granada War Relocation Center, was one of 10 Japanese American internment camps, or “relocation” centers, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The camp opened in August 1942 and is about a mile West of the small farming community of Granada, a half mile south of Highway 50. It is about 25 miles East of Lamar, where we are staying. At it’s peak it had a population of 7,318 persons.
Nearly all of those interned at the camp came from the West Coast of the U.S., mostly from the Los Angeles area. Each person was only allowed to bring one bag, therefore, many people were forced to sell what they could or give away their possessions before being forced out. This also included pets. The camp's unofficial name quickly became Camp Amache, named after a Cheyenne Indian chief's daughter.
The Camp Amache residential area was spread across a low hill, which prevented the flooding and mud problems which plagued other internment camps. It was surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, with eight machine-gun towers located all around the camp. However, all eight towers were rarely manned at one time, and the guns were never used. The camp had a police department which was actually worked by Japanese Americans living at the camp.
Camp leaders, internees themselves, set up a separate Amache District for Boy Scouts at the camp. These Scouts still flew the American flag, notwithstanding the treatment they and their families had received from the government. The camp had a high school with an excellent football team. Sources indicate that the high school football team lost one game in three years. One noteworthy event was when the Amache football team played the undefeated football team from Holly, Colorado, which is located just 11 miles east of Amache on U.S. 50. This game was unique because Holly actually agreed to come up to the camp and play Amache on their home field. One of the Holly team players was Roy Romer, who went on to become Governor of Colorado in 1987. The Amache team won this game by a score of 7-0, the only touchdown coming from a trick play, thus the Amache team can claim to be undefeated on their own field.
Today there are no complete structures left on the site, however, there are hundreds of concrete foundations and the road system is still passable. We drove around for quite some time looking around the camp. The cemetery is still there and is still maintained. Over 100 internees died during their stay at the camp and are buried in this cemetery. There are also over 40 military veterans, Japanese who, after joining the US military, fought and died in Europe. We had one cache near the cemetery and another near the entrance to the camp. It was spooky driving around the now deserted and desolate camp. After our caching we headed back to the coach where we spent the rest of the evening.
Tuesday, August 30th, a stay at home day. Both Jackie and I got some chores done around the coach, but other than that, we just stayed in for the day. Wednesday we went out after lunch and did our laundry in town. We then went to Walmart to do some shopping. Later on in the afternoon we paid a visit to the Lamar Elks Lodge. We have never been to this lodge, which is only about a mile South of where we are staying. The lodge is in the clubhouse for the Lamar Golf Course, although I am unsure as to whether the Lodge owns the course or just rents space. It is only on one end of the building. The lodge has a very nice, homey clubroom and the people that were in there were very friendly. We chatted with the Exalted Ruler for quite a while. The Lodge has about 500 members. We had three drinks, one of which was on the lodge, then got our lodge pin and headed home for dinner.
Thursday, September 1st, one of our anniversaries. On September 1, 1998, I moved from Phoenix to Indio to be with Jackie and we have been together ever since. Happy Anniversary us!! Yea! Today was a moving day, so about 9:30 we pulled in the walls and started North out of Lamar, heading for Limon, Colorado, about 120 miles Northwest. It was an uneventful trip and we arrived at the KOA in Limon about noon. Since we are only going to be here one night we didn’t even unhook the car. We just plugged in the water and electric, settled the coach and relaxed for the day. Limon is just a small town, about 2,500 population, that sits at about 5,300 feet elevation. It is mostly just a railroad town, but now has one of Colorado’s prisons, which employs about 500 people and is the town’s biggest employer.
Friday, September 2nd, we were up and out of the KOA about 9:30 and on the road again. We picked up I-70, our first freeway in about a month, and headed Northwest towards Loveland, Colorado. Loveland is in the Northern part of the front range, not too far from Fort Collins. We had 140 miles to drive and the first 90 minutes we were in some weather. Light rain, some fog and lots of wind. As we got closer to Denver we drove out of the weather and it got nice. The traffic in the Denver metro area was pretty heavy, as could be expected on a Friday before a holiday weekend. We finally arrived at the Riverview RV park just West
of Loveland on Highway 34. Seems to be a nice park and it looks pretty full for the weekend. Since we are a little ways up into the canyon we have no phone service where we are parked. Fortunately, I was able to get the satellite TV working and they have good internet here, so the only thing we lack is a phone while we are in the coach.
We will be here in Loveland for a week before moving down closer to Denver for a while. This seems like a good place to close this episode of our story. I will post again, probably in about two weeks when we get done in Denver. Until we meet again, remember the words of Henry David Thoreau; “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” Bye.
