Dodge City’s Grand Bullfight

Wild West  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

In the long summer of 1884, Dodge City, Kansas, was a city suffering an identity crisis. For a decade-plus Dodge had been the acknowledged Gomorrah of the Plains, and for more than a half-dozen years she had reigned supreme as Queen of the Cow Towns. But with farming edging out the cattle trade, and civilized folk crowding the gamblers, whores and assorted rowdies, the sinful queen was in danger of losing her tarnished crown and having the candle she had burned at both ends for so long snuffed out.

Local factions were divided over whether this was a good thing. More progress-minded (for the most part, newer) residents longed to see the town’s wild old days fade into history and myth. In mid-June, the prohibitionist Dodge City Times noted glumly that “Dodge City is only partly civilized.” Others accepted—even reveled in—Dodge’s rambunctious image, and had no wish to see it changed. The forthcoming Independence Day celebration highlighted the town’s internal struggle, with the recently adopted and more austere Memorial Day holiday fast gaining national favor over the raucous, flashy Fourth of July as the designated patriotic observance. A kinder, gentler Dodge seemed destined, but the current city fathers, longtime residents all, weren’t quite ready to give up their town’s bloodthirsty reputation, nor the dollars that stampeded in each summer with the Texas longhorns.

Being politicians, however, the city dads cast about for a way to celebrate the Fourth that would please the family crowd and the wild-and-woollies alike, something acceptable to all (or most, anyway) that was still properly – well, Dodge. In early May, saloonkeeper and former mayor Alonzo B. Webster conceived an idea that seemed likely to suit all needs. The town would stage a real, live, Mexican bullfight—the first such sanctioned event ever held on U. S. soil. If she couldn’t stay wicked forever, Dodge could at least have a bang-up last hurrah before she donned the robes of respectability. In the words of one chronicler, “The Cowboy Capitol was determined to ‘get to the joint’ one more time.” 

Webster later told a St. Louis newspaper reporter that after checking local and state laws and satisfying himself that such a spectacle was legal, he “pushed the matter for all it was worth.”   When he pitched the idea to the town council, they gave their immediate and enthusiastic approval. Within hours local businesses had ponied up a $3,000 stake toward establishing the “Dodge City Fair and Driving Park Association.” Twenty-four hours later, the fledgling group had amassed the entire $10,000 bankroll needed to build an arena and fund the event.

With scarcely six weeks before the holiday, the Association scrambled to put the pieces into place.  The “what” and “when” already settled, they got busy on the “where.” Dodge had no suitable venue. With apparent unconcern over conflicts of interest, the Association bought what it considered the ideal piece of land for the enterprise from its own treasurer, a merchant/stockman Andrew Jackson (A.J.) Anthony—a founding citizen of Dodge. Anthony sold the association a 40-acre parcel southwest of town, just on the Dodge side of the Arkansas River.

Webster hired five genuine Mexican bullfighters from Paso Del Norte, where he’d apparently witnessed their capitán’s prowess several years earlier. W.K. Moore, a Scottish lawyer and professor at a Mexican university, acted as the matadors’ de facto manager; he struck the deal with Webster to bring them by train to Kansas. The human side of the equation solved, attention now turned to finding suitable opponents. Since the bullfighters would be imported, as it were, Webster’s group decided the bulls should be local talent. For this, they turned to Dodge’s original cattle driver, a Texas rancher by the unlikely name of Doctor Wellborn Barton.

Tags: Wild West

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.