The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [103]
I had a look in the window of the Family Pharmacy and Gift Shop, which had an interesting and unusual display that included a wheelchair, a packet of disposable absorbent underpants (it isn’t often you find a store catering for the incontinent impulse shopper), teddy bears, coffee-mugs bearing wholesome sentiments like World’s Best Grandma, mother’s day cards and a variety of porcelain animals. In one corner of the window was a poster for a concert by – you are never going to believe this – Paul Revere and the Raiders. Can you beat that? There they were, still dressed up like Continental soldiers, prancing about and grinning, just like when I was in junior high school. They would be performing at the Civic Auditorium in Dodge City in two weeks. Tickets started at $10.75. This was all becoming too much for me. I was glad to get in the car and drive on to Dodge City, which at least is intentionally unreal.
Somewhere during the seventy miles between Great Bend and Dodge City you leave the Midwest and enter the West. The people in the towns along the way stop wearing baseball caps and shuffling along with that amiable dopeyness characteristic of the Midwest and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute. People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.fn1 Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you’ve ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from 2 million to 90,000.
Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.
When they weren’t shooting things, the people of the West went into towns like Dodge City for a little social and sexual intercourse. At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women that only a cowboy could find attractive. But it was never as tough and dangerous as you were led to believe on Gunsmoke and all those movies about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. For ten years it was the biggest cattle market in the world; that’s all.
In all those years, there were only thirty-four people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery and most of those were just vagrants found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighbouring ‘Historic Front Street’, which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs. Matt Dillon never