Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West by Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra (review)

Few historical events concerning the Great Plains have captured the popular imagination as strongly as frontier violence in the nineteenth century, of which Dodge City, Kansas, is a quintessential example. This southwestern Kansas town's violent past has been the inspiration for numerous television shows, movies, and books that depict legendary desperados and lawmen facing each other in bloody combat. It is this popular image of Dodge City that is examined by Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra in their book Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West.

Dykstra and Manfra have written a readable and well-researched study of the mythology concerning Dodge City. The authors rely on news accounts and personal recollections to discuss the violence of the early days of the city, but their real focus is the frequently exaggerated reports of the era that created the widespread perception that the town was the "wickedest city in America." The city's notorious reputation only became more concrete as writers and motion picture directors continued producing works that depicted the town's deadly reputation, which became so ingrained in Americans' minds that the saying "get out of Dodge" was coined. This book supports the growing body of research that contends much of the public perception of violence of the Old West is based more on embellishment than historical reality. Dykstra and Manfra go further than other studies on the subject, however, by discussing how the public memory of Dodge City has been used throughout the decades to support various positions in American society, such as the recent national debate on gun control.

The authors conclude by discussing Dodge Citians' changing attitudes toward this popular image, from distancing themselves from its infamous past by the 1890s, to promoting it as tourism began to increase in the twentieth century. Sadly, this discussion is relatively brief and is a lost opportunity for a more groundbreaking study. A more detailed examination on this issue would show that this embrace is based more on the popular image created by television shows like Gunsmoke rather than on the actual history of the town. A deeper look would have added to the work by demonstrating not only the influence of the mythology of the city's founding on the national memory, but also the effects this folklore has upon the current residents of this legendary Old West town.