Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dodge City, The Most Western Town of All by Odie B. Faulk

1979; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1979.0006

1948-7142

Fred L. Lee,

Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Reviews Dodge City, The Most Western Town of All. By Odie B. Faulk. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 226 pages, $9.95.) Thanks largely to movies and television most of us no doubt even today conjure up an image of Dodge City as being a hell-raising kind of town out on the Kansas prairie where Matt Dillon once protected lawabiding citizens from less-than-honest gamblers, quarrelling prostitutes, slip­ pery con-artists, fist-fights, gunfights and a few jailbreaks. So much has been written and dramatized about Dodge City and the West in general that it’s often difficult to sift fact from fiction about the two. Now, thanks to Dr. Faulk’s narrative, one can easily begin to do such. In an easy-to-read chronological writing style the author traces the history of Dodge City from June, 1542, when Francisco de Coronado led a party of thirty mounted Spaniards with ten footmen and servants across the Oklahoma panhandle into southeastern Kansas. Although other animals made the Kansas prairie their home, it was the buffalo, Faulk writes, that first brought people into the vicinity of what was to become Dodge City. Buffalo hunters, killing the immense herds of bison in the area for profit, resulted in the establishment of Fort Dodge in southwestern Kansas — a fortification so named, it’s said, for its first commandant, Major General Grenville Mellon Dodge, who’d arrived on the site in 1865. Dodge City was founded in 1872 on the western edge of the military reservation. To serve the buffalo hunters, as well as the soldiers at Fort Dodge, merchants moved into the new town along with gamblers, saloonkeepers and prostitutes. The same situation continued after 1876 when cowboys began arriving in Dodge with herds of Texas longhorns by way of the Western or Dodge City cattle trail, their pockets filled with money and their hearts set on having a rip-roaring time in the then wide-open town. 358 Western American Literature It’s in the 1870s when the fictitious Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty enter the picture along with the not-so-fictitious Masterson brothers, Ed, Jim and Bat; Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp; “Mysterious” Dave Mather; “Squirrel Tooth” Alice; James “Dog” Kelly; Luke Short; John Henry “Doc” Holli­ day; “Big Nose” Kate Elder and others. Along with the itinerant in Dodge there also came an element of reform to the town in the guise of merchants, bankers, doctors, lawyers, school teachers and ministers. Thus the nucleus of the present community was formed — a pleasant Kansas town, Faulk contends, whose populace today speak of their present and past history with matter-of-factness. Faulk’s book has appeal to two audiences — the Western history buff who wants solid footnoting in his armchair adventuring and the reader who just simply wants to learn about the history of Dodge City. Illustrations in the form of old photographs and engravings from the prestigious file of the Kansas State Historical Society complement the narra­ tive. FRED L. LEE, Secretary, Kansas City Posse of the Westerners Cassady, Carolyn. Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal. (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976. 93 pages, $4.00.) In January, 1952, Jack Kerouac went to San Francisco to live and work at the home of Neal Cassady, his big brother figure, hero, and symbol for the beat generation. Neal promised a place to write, whorehouses, Dexedrine, and freedom in exchange for a tutor/pupil arrangement “much like Gauguin and Van Gogh.” They discussed Proust, tried peyote, and shared Neal’s wife, Carolyn, until early 1953 when tensions within the household drove Kerouac to Mexico. With this brief volume, an excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively entitled The Third Word, Carolyn Cassady recalls that year off the road. She concentrates on their triangular relationship, while writing in a senti­ mental haze about her romantic encounters with Kerouac. The affair elevates her from the role of “a neglected household drudge” to “a member of the clan.” She becomes a part of their world and observes its workings. From her portrait of the beat generation, Cassady reveals characteristics not found in the self-confident hipsters of Kerouac’s writings...