But I had read Tom Clavin’s The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend – a biopic about Red Cloud, one of the most powerful chiefs of the Oglala Sioux and a contemporary of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse – and decided to give a pass at Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.
To keep it short and simple, the book had too many players with a narrative that went back and forth in time without a clear through-line. I’m sure it didn’t help that as a result of my waning interest, I read four other books while slowly tackling Dodge City. I did enjoy learning about Bat Masterson and several other contemporaries of Wyatt Earp whose stories have not carried the same mystique and have been obscured by the annals of time.
If you like the legends of the gunslingers of the Wild West, you may find Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West interesting.
glenn schiffman says
June 26, 2017 at 3:21 pmMy brief encounter with Dodge City
In Dodge City US 56 splits off from 50 and diagonals southwest from an intersection where a bank sign flashed 103 degrees at 12:01 PM. I turned on the local AM station hoping to get a weather report. If there were a low-pressure system on the heels of the hot air I was in, I’d likely be driving into severe weather. The NRA sponsored the local news. A newscaster rifled through a gamut of hog futures, crop reports, train schedules, police logs, and little league games. He finally mentioned that possible thunderstorms south of town shouldn’t affect the strawberry social on the lawn at First Baptist.
Highway 56 out of town was lined with curio shops and gun shops and single story motels. Each motel implied that Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday somehow had slept there. I turned off the radio as I passed the original Boot Hill. Treeless, its graves baked belly-up in the oven air. I couldn’t get out of Dodge fast enough.