Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Friendship
My friend Onur is moving back home to Turkey in a few months, and as part of his send-off, I wanted to take him to see a part of the United States unlike the bicoastal elite havens ~San Francisco and Boston~ that he’s accustomed to. To accomplish this, a plan was conceived to visit my hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, to see its wonders, be immersed in its culture, and experience its marquee event: the DC Roundup Rodeo. Also joining the international delegation would be Jacob, our resident Canadian and an expert in getting lost in the most fun ways imaginable, two indispensable traits that would help us on our journey.
I, like many people who have escaped their Midwest hometowns to live in the Big City, have a love-hate relationship with where I grew up. I always say it’s a good place to be from, but I don’t see myself ever moving back. When I do visit, a combination of regional allergies and prairie madness makes it feel like my own body and mind are rejecting being there. Part of me worried that the trip would be a bust, with little to do, and miserable weather keeping us inside, a recipe for the onset of prairie madness.
I watched a video where a guy road-tripped through Kansas along the path of the Steel Ball Run, a race across the US depicted in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 7 (and if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry). The route traverses the entire country from San Diego to New York, with the fourth stage cutting across the Great Plains through Kansas. Of the entire journey, he described these 500 miles of Kansas as the worst and most miserable, with some choice quotes to match1. This contributed to my worries about how people from the outside world might react to this place, but like most things in life, it’s better to see for yourself what the deal is.
Southwest Prologue
The path we chose to get to Dodge City was circuitous, to say the least. Normally you can reach Dodge via one of the two daily flights from Denver, but instead we elected to fly to Albuquerque (the reason for which I will reveal momentarily). But first, after a short hop from SFO, we were descending into the Sunport on a warm summer night under the light of a full moon.
We had planned to walk straight to our hotel, but instead we were captured by the siren song of something powerful, something extremely American. Like moths to a flame, we were drawn into the glow of the golden letters of a Waffle House. Since the nature of the journey we were on was one of cultural exchange, there was no way we could skip making a stop here for a midnight snack. Afterwards, we walked through one of Albuquerque’s finest research parks to our hotel to turn in for the night, preparing for the day that lay ahead of us.
So why were we in Albuquerque? So that we could take a 12-hour train ride instead of a 45-minute flight into Dodge, obviously. We had the privilege of traversing through scenic New Mexico from the observation car on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.
Our train was set to depart at 11:30 AM, which didn’t give us much time to actually explore ABQ, but there was one thing from an internship summer I spent here that I was nostalgic for, and that was the cinnamon roll from Frontier. As we devoured it, I reminisced about the coffee shop next door where I spent my nights grinding out GRE practice books with the other nerds. Next, we had to get downtown to the Amtrak station, which we did by taking the ART bus, for which there was a stop conveniently located across the street. We then braved the ABQ sun to walk a few blocks to a nearby grocery store, where we stocked up on rations (breakfast burritos) for the journey ahead.
In classic Amtrak fashion, a freight train somewhere in Arizona caused a one-hour delay, which, all things considered, isn’t that bad. The delay did however snowball another two hours, pushing our estimated arrival time into Dodge to 3 AM. We didn’t let that stop us from enjoying the breathtaking scenery as we snaked through the New Mexico landscape, through canyons, mountains, and the high plains. We chased a thunderstorm, performatively read our books, and enjoyed the Amtrak three-course dinner. Night fell as we descended the Raton Pass into Colorado for the downhill portion of the route, which would take us all the way into Kansas.
Getting the Heck into Dodge
Despite the late night, we had an early morning start because the first planned activity was to go see the annual Longhorn cattle drive down Wyatt Earp Boulevard, the main street in Dodge, where actual cowboys simulate what the town was like 150 years ago, when sometimes upwards of 15,000 cows would arrive daily from ranches all the way down to Texas to be put on the train and shipped to the East.
The lore behind why Dodge was founded at this spot is that bars were outlawed within five miles of Fort Dodge, so an enterprising man used a wagon wheel and counted out exactly five miles’ worth of rotations up the Arkansas River, then pitched a tent right there. Today, Dodge is still primarily a cow town, with two beef-packing plants as the pillars of the local economy, which is how my parents and a lot of immigrants from all over the world ended up settling down here.
The reason I chose this weekend to showcase Dodge was that this is when the yearly rodeo was happening, along with all the associated fanfare around town that it brings. Events like the cattle drive are an example, as well as the next event we went to: the High Noon Shootout. In a celebration of the history of the battle between lawlessness and order in town, as depicted in many westerns like Gunsmoke (one of the longest-running series of all time), they stage gunfights at the Boot Hill Museum. The museum includes a facade of the main street of Dodge from the time when lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were fighting against the violence and degeneracy associated with Dodge and the Old West writ large. This is where the phrase “get the hell out of Dodge” comes from2!
Afterwards, we explored the museum, where much of my knowledge of Dodge City history was refreshed. Which just leaves the main event of the evening: our first night of the rodeo. Technically, the rodeo had been going on for five days at this point and it was in its penultimate night, but I digress. We got our servings of bull riding, barrel racing, and last but not least, mutton busting. We watched dudes wrestle and hog-tie calves to the ground, and got to see the crown jewel, a Ram America250 special edition truck, do laps around the course (it could be yours!). I can’t help but think of the scene in Borat where he fires up a rodeo by praising the “war of terror” in Iraq before inciting a riot when he sings his fake Kazakh anthem over the national anthem.
Kansas Exploration
Our second day focused on exploring the surrounding area and towns, mostly stopping at stuff I’d driven by hundreds of times. I would say one of the most “Dodge” things imaginable is that there are scenic overlook points at feedlots all over the area, with cows as far as the eye can see. When the wind is just wrong and they’re giving the cows one last bulk feed, we get to really experience the smell of money.
Just outside the namesake Fort Dodge is the Coronado Cross, which stands on top of a hill near where Coronado’s 1540s expedition for a city of gold purportedly stopped and turned back toward Mexico. A judge who lived by the hill 400 years later decided to place a wooden cross there to mark the spot, and its been there ever since.
One of the most eye-catching things you’ll see while driving on Highway 400 right outside of Mullinville, Kansas, is the sculptures and whirligigs of M.T. Liggett (RIP). For over 20 years, he built political artwork, and now it acts as a sort of time capsule of 1990s and 2000s Kansas conservative grievances (see the book What’s the Matter with Kansas for more). There’s almost a mile’s worth of these guys, with everything from Greenpeace, Bill Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher, to local Kiowa County3 judges and sheriffs. His number one enemy, of course, is the EPA but somehow he was also anti-oil companies. I remember looking forward to driving by these as a kid since they broke up the monotonous drive, and now as an adult there’s a morbid curiosity.
After driving past Mullinville, you encounter Greensburg, Kansas, which has two claims to fame: first, it’s got a really big well, called, well, the Big Well, which is the largest hand-dug well in the world. Also, the town was completely devastated by an EF5 tornado in 2007. There’s a museum for both, built around the well, which we visited. The pictures of the destruction are harrowing, and the town still has only half of its pre-tornado population. There are pictures of George W. Bush visiting, who didn’t hesitate to send FEMA this time, having learned his lesson after Hurricane Katrina. You’re also able to climb down into the well using a spiral staircase that’s quite striking. Also, I lied: Greensburg has a third thing , a big-ass meteorite weighing over 1,000 pounds they found here in 1949, which is also on display.
We then turned north and headed to Kinsley, Kansas, to see its famous “Midway USA” sign4, which, while not at the actual center of the US, is amusing to me because it’s the center of online debate in certain sects. Next to the sign is a museum, for which we were the only visitors that day, per the logbook, with relics from the county spanning the last 100 years. One such relic was a whole sod house recreation with a staged interior. Another was a whole wall of different types of barbed wire, and my personal favorite was a bike that was ridden from New York to Kinsley in 1900, which featured no gears and no brakes!
The only thing more abundant in western Kansas than cows is wind, and lots of it. Dodge boasts an average wind speed of 14 mph in normal conditions, with windstorms that can hit over 70 mph! People here saw this and decided to build thousands of wind turbines all over the state (before they realized wind power was woke), and now half of Kansas’s power comes from wind. Standing under the tower, you really get to see the scale of it and the speed at which the turbine blades are spinning. You can really appreciate the flatness here, with a horizon that goes on for miles in every direction, and turbines as far as the eye can see.
The final stop on our odyssey was the Boot Hill Casino, and honestly every time I go in there it’s pretty depressing. It’s supposed to harkens back to Old West frontier days when the town’s Long Branch saloon hosted gamblers and rogues, but it was probably pretty depressing back then, too. It didn’t help that it felt too packed for a Sunday afternoon so we left, with pockets only $20 lighter, and returned home to recharge before hitting the Rodeo for the Grand Finals.
Since it was no longer Jacob and Onur’s first rodeo, we stood at the fence to watch up close. Now experts, we could critique the performance of each rider and give feedback on what we would have done differently, like: just don’t let go and fall off. As we watched people nearly get maimed for a chance to win $5,000, I couldn’t think of anything more American. The rodeo clown retold the same jokes as the previous night, the same truck drove around, and we ate funnel cake.
Epilogue
For the last stop of the trip, like many before us, we had to gather supplies (Dodge City bourbon) before embarking on the journey west, so we hit up the local distillery. Like the trip in, our flights back to SF were not without trials. Storms caused a bunch of mayhem in Denver, which diverted a bunch of planes away and delayed our getting the heck out of Dodge by three hours, which at first glance seems bad, and there’s no way that could possibly be good. But if you really think about it, we did lose three hours at the beginning of the trip from the train delays, so now we have the lost hours of Dodge returned to us.
- “three long and somewhat miserable days”, “ a real trial and endurance “
and “Prairie madness is real and I discovered I was very susceptible to it” -Trey
↩︎ - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-dodge-city-became-symbol-frontier-lawlessness-180967912/ ↩︎
- Fun Fact: Kiowa County voted to secede from Kansas in the early 90s along with a handful of other counites to form “West Kansas” ↩︎
- This sign is featured on the cover for chapter 40 of SteelBall Run!
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