Our plan for today was to take a scenic drive ( just for a change! 🙂 ) to the northwest of Dodge City to see the Monument Rocks National Landmark. It was just under 2 hours drive each way and would leave us time later in the day to visit the Boot Hill Museum here in town.
We set off after breakfast and made a short stop a few miles west of town to see where there are still traces of wheel ruts made by wagons travelling the Santa Fe trail in the 1880s. It’s not too easy to see them bu you can just make them out in the middle of the photo below.
Another 45 minutes down the road we took a short detour to the small town of Holcomb. In 1959 the Clutter family, Dad, Mom and teenage son and daughter were brutally slaughtered by a couple of ex-cons who had been led to believe that the Clutters had a lot of money in their farmhouse. For that time it was a seriously shocking crime but it would have faded out of memory if not for the fact that Truman Capote immortalized the story in the American Classic novel “In Cold Blood”. It was a quiet, ordinary looking little town and the only reminder of it’s notoriety is a memorial sign erected in the town park.
The drive through the Kansas cornfields was again very, very flat so it is understandable that the Monument Rocks draw a lot of visitors to this out-of-the-way part of Kansas. They are chalk buttes and mesas that stand up to 70 feet high above the plain. We walked around them and wondered how long it would be before they disintegrated into the ground.
We took a different road back, and I wouldn’t have thought it possible but the landscape seemed even flatter and more featureless than where we had already been! Finally on the horizon another huge wind farm grew larger and larger as we approached. IN the morning we had passed an enormous manufacturing and storage facility for the parts of these huge windmills. Hundreds of enormous blades piled up in rows.
Back in Dodge we relaxed for a short time in the hotel before heading downtown for dinner at Montana Mikes Steakhouse, then we crossed the road and paid our entry tickets to the Boot Hill Museum complex. It’s built right where the original Boot Hill cemetery existed and they had extensive displays about the original native American inhabitants of the area as well as some really well done displays about the growth of Dodge City from its days as an army fort. They have a faithfully reconstructed “Front Street” with all the original shops, banks and saloons.
We wandered through the buildings and finally took our seats in front of the saloon to watch the Gunfight. On a previous holiday we’d visted Tombstone in Arizona and watched their “Gunfight at the Ok Corral”, so we knew what to expect, but with this one we were a lot closer to the action and even with blanks the gunshots were LOUD! It was short and very entertaining and a great way to finish up our time in the Wickedest Town in the West.
