Buckskin Joe

Woke up to a few grunts & snorts....it was the zoo next door. We had filled up the grey waste tank & were unable to empty it, because I had been too tight the extra. Jackie was forced to shower in the campsite block (she won’t be doing that too often - all her clothes got wet).

After breakfast, we set out for the Boot Hill Museum leaving the RV still hooked up & Jackie ‘s damp clothes drying in the sun. En-route we took photos of various statues around Dodge City, then just after 9.00am we visited the museum.

First we watched an informative 13 minute video that told us all about the history of Dodge City. It was established in 1871 by a cattle rancher & soon cowboys were driving their Texas Longhorn cattle from Texas through. Buffalo hunters moved into the area & the town grew with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad. Bars, brothels & gambling dens soon sprang up & became pretty lawless. Some of the prostitutes had brilliant names such as Squirrel Tooth Alice, Big Nose Kate & Big Emma.

Shootings were a daily occurrence & the dead were often buried with their boots still on in the cemetery on the hill, hence it acquired it’s name ‘Boot Hill Cemetery’. The 1st recorded burial at Boot Hill Cemetery was Jack Reynolds in September 1872 who was shot 6 times. The last burial was Alice Chambers on 5th May 1878.

Dodge City soon acquired a reputation as the most wickedest place in America & the true Cowboy Capital of the World. Law enforcement arrived in the form of the infamous Wyatt Earp & Batt Masterson, who were trigger happy but turned the town around.

The Museum is actually situated on the cemetery, of which part of it still remains in tact. There are plaques & wooden epitaphs for some of it’s buried residents. The museum consisted of numerous buildings accurately reproduced from the originals & contained original artefacts from the time. It was fascinating & Jackie has declared it her highlight of the trip so far.

One interesting but sad fact is that in 1870 there were over 30 million buffalo roaming the prairie around Dodge City, but by the turn of the century there was less that 1000. Hunters were rounding them up & slaughtering them in their hundreds each day. One photo should man stood on a pile of buffalo skulls at least 50 ft high. In the gift shop, Jackie treated me to genuine buffalo skin credit card wallet.

Whilst in the Museum the weather had changed dramatically & it was thunder & lightning. We had no choice to run back in the pelting rain, unhook & drive out of the campsite at 10.59am. We had to be out by 11.00!!

Today, the plan was to pelt along Highway 50 (The Loneliest Road) for over 300 miles to Cañon City & some proper scenery. We put a $100 fuel in the RV at Cimarron, then continued through the rather desolate towns of Ingalls, Garden City, Larkin, Syracuse & Coolidge. Every single town in western Kansas has a ‘Prairie Cathedral’, a massive white storage silo for wheat.

At 1.30pm we crossed into Colorado & immediately stopped for lunch a coffee & a sandwich. Then it was on through Holly, Granada, Lamar (where we stopped to take a photo of the Petrified Wood Car Dealership), Hasty, Las Animas & La Junta, where I also planned to stop but in our haste we missed it.

On we went, still on Highway 50, through Swink, Rocky Ford, Manzanola, Fowler & Avondale to Pueblo. On this days drive so far we had really not seen anything of interest, just Prairie Cathedrals & we smelt them before we saw them, lots & lots & lots of cattle ranches with thousands of cattle tightly penned in together & being fattened up ready for slaughter. We was not nice to see, it brought home the realities of Cattle farming & almost wanted to make you turn vegetarian.

At Peublo, we turned off to photo the National Medal of Honor Memorial in the modestly named Heroes Plaza, then we parked up for a stroll along the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo. We wished we had bothered because it was very man made & fake looking, also annoyingly I forgot to wear my Fitbit.

We then spent an age looking for a Walmart to pick up some dinner, chicken & salami pasta. We raced on to Cañon City, refuelled (another $100) then drove up to our KOA campsite at Royal Gorge. This is what we had been looking for - surrounded by The Rockies. We supped a beer as the sun went down over the mountains & made the decision we would stay here a 2nd night.

The remainder of the evening was spent having dinner & watching the first 3 episodes of the brilliant ‘After Life’.

FITBIT = 10,141 steps / 4.72 miles.

Song of the Day - The Loneliest Road (feat. Phil Wiggins) by Blackwater Mojo.Read more