While most people are more used to getting the hell out of Dodge, Patrick O’Donovan went the other way for the Observer Magazine, looking to explore the wild west (‘In Search of Dodge City’, 3 October 1965).
The wild west was a ‘beautiful, false and most potent legend’ impossible to define geographically, said O’Donovan, but ‘if one has to be arbitrary about it, the wild west is the Central Plain of the United States’. Not all of it was cattle – ‘It farms and mines and sprouts industries’ – but Dodge City, ‘now almost suburban, is still a great cattle centre and it cherishes the memory of its lawless and outrageous past’. Gun fights were a rarity, he said – the last fatal fighting was 10 years ago. Now the guns were used for target practice, as a yellow ‘Slow’ road sign riddled with bullet-holes attested.
‘Most of the West is not mountainous, as in many western films: it is dead flat, under huge skies and fierce rains,’ but modern cowboys still rounded up their Herefords on horseback.
He met the impressive marshal of Dodge City, who seemed to come from central casting – ‘tall, trim, middle-aged, dark and saturnine’ and ‘the heir to a tradition that has sustained TV series for years. After all, one of his predecessors really was Wyatt Earp.’
There were pictures of Dodge City Days carnival floats with flamboyant dance-hall girls in traditional finery and saloon-bar keepers. ‘This is the part of America that was reputed to be isolationist and suspicious of strangers. In fact, it is probably the kindest place in the world.’ Probably not the Native American view.
Agriculture still ‘dominates utterly’ and there was no hiding its true nature. ‘Outside the big cattle towns of the West there are luxurious concentration camps for livestock – the final stage of what is still, spiritually, the essential business of the West.’
