Dodge City Town Company, Ford Co., Kansas. Inducements offered to actual settlers! Prospects of the town better than any other in the upper Arkansas Valley! Free Bridge across the Arkansas River! The town a little over one year old, and contains over seventy buildings! Good school, hotel, etc. AT & SF RR depot in town... Enquire of: R. M. Wright at Chas. Rath & Co. store or E. B. Kirk, Secy and Treas., Fort Dodge. Dodge City Messenger, June 25, 1874

[Buffalo hunter] Charles Rath did like good clothes. He liked for those for whom he was responsible to be well clothed too. He wore tailor made suits and he ordered his shirts from New York, especially made. He liked rich brown suits, white gloves, and in his later days discarded expensive boots in favor of highly polished shoes. The Rath Trail

Wyatt Earp, who was on our city police force last summer, is in town again. We hope he will accept a position on the force once more. He had a quiet way of taking the most desperate characters into custody which invariably gave one the impression that the city was able to enforce her mandates and preserve her dignity. It wasn't considered policy to draw a gun on Wyatt, unless you got the drop and meant to burn powder without any preliminary talk. Dodge City Times, July 7, 1877

Mesrs Beeson & Harris [Long Branch saloon] have the boss piano player of the west. All lovers of fine music ought to call and hear him play. He is simply immense. Ford County Globe, November 1, 1881

I think it was the distinguishing trait of Wyatt Earp, the leader of the Earp brothers, that more than any man I have ever known, he was devoid of physical fear. He feared the opinion of no one but himself and his self respect was his creed. W. B. 'Bat' Masterson, Tombstone Prospector, August 16, 1910

[Pioneer Kansas and Dodge City lawman]Ham Bell says the idea that he never drew a gun on a man when he was sheriff here in the early days is all wrong. He never shot a man, he says, and that was mainly because he was always careful to draw his gun in plenty of time before the other man drew his. "If I'd never drawn a gun," he says, "I wouldn't have lived a week." Dodge City Daily Globe, January 14, 1931

When asked what Dodge City in 1879 would have looked like to a 'modern' eye, Dr. C. Robert Haywood, leading historian of Old West Kansas, stated, "A 24-hour-a-day carnival." 1999 Interview

[At the age of 19] Ham Bell hunted buffalo awhile, then got a position with a Santa Fe agent whose office was a box-car, worked there until his appointment as assistant marshal under James Gainsford [Great Bend, Kansas]. Once, when someone said he would not shoot, that he was bluffing, Ham gained some fame of a sort by saying, as he looked the ruffian straight in the eye, "A kid will shoot quicker than a man."

The Episcopal church, though small, is a little gem -- the most artistic building in Dodge City. With its brown stone walls, colored glass windows and square bell tower, it is delightfully suggestive of the chapels of rural England. Robert M. Wright, Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital and the Great Southwest, 1913
[Church still stands and is active.]