What I did on my summer vacation -- Part 2, Quilts and Dodge

Oh, Mister Dillon

Tuesday, Aug. 22

Because this is our vacation, we needed to do more than drive to Nebraska, watch the sun disappear, and drive back home. I originally planned to spend the entire day after the eclipse exploring Lincoln. It is, after all, the state capitol and the home of a branch of the U. of Nebraska, so lots of sightseeing should be available. And indeed there is.

But I had decided to cut the vacation short a day so we could be home all day Sunday and recuperate/take care of laundry. Still, Lincoln had one sight I was determined we should see -- the International Quilt Study Center and Museum. When your wife’s a country gal and a quilter, you gotta go to a quilt museum, especially if it's supposed to be the largest in the world.

Exterior of the quilt museum. The architect apparently

told whoever picked the design that it emulates the

structure of a quilt. Yeah, me too.

They have so many quilts they change the displays frequently, so whatever was on display there when we were there won’t be the display when you arrive. Assuming you go.

Two of the most fascinating exhibits focused on tapestries, clothes and other items featuring intricate stitching and quilting from the region I took to calling the “stans” -- you know, Uzbekistan, Waziristan, that part of the world -- and quilts by a Nebraska artist and quilter who produces pieces that are essentially 3-D topographical maps of parts of the state. Seriously cool stuff.

Heart sculputers done by various artists are scatterd

around Lincoln. 

One of the quilts on display.

One of the quilt blocks that depict topographical features

of Nebraska.

Google told us that most people spend about two hours at the museum, and we do. We could have spent more time there, but we were up against noon, when I had decided we needed to grab lunch and get the heck into Dodge, our next destination.

Now before you go thinking that “get the heck into” expression is just another of my sad attempts to be cute, let me tell you: That is the official tourist motto for Dodge right now. Go look it up. I’ll wait.

Somehow the route our various devices outline for leaving Lincoln don’t manage to take us by anyplace to eat. We wind up driving to York, the home of the hot-air balloon water tower, to find a fast food place and pick up the highway that will return us to Kansas. Travel note: If you are on the AT&T network, you may not have cell service in York. The coverage map I looked says you will, but I didn't. I don’t know what network covers York, though.

Did I mention the Great Plains are aptly named? The trip southwest to Dodge made the areas we’d been through til now look positively lush and hilly. And as an extra benefit, the GPS signal starts fading in and out the farther we travel into Kansas, almost always disappearing when we really needed guidance about turns, which were not always clearly marked with signs. Fortunately, Sharon wanted to buy an atlas before we left so she would be able to figure out where we were without looking at a device. Sometimes the old ways come in handy.

Shortly after we turn onto the highway leading west to Dodge, we encounter a feature we’ll discover is a source of pride for some of the residents of the city -- wind turbines. Not such a big deal to those of us who live on the edge of West Texas and travel through the area frequently. But we hear references to the wind turbines outside Dodge more than once the day we toured the town.

When you drive from Fort Worth to Lubbock on U.S. 84, you will pass hundreds of wind turbines, but most of them are set well off the roadway. On the road leading to Dodge, the turbines line both sides of the road, and they’re not that far away. This goes on for almost 30 miles.

As we near Dodge, the GPS signal returns, but the TomTom takes us on a route that loops around the north side of town. I’m pretty sure we could have taken a shorter route, but I usually get in trouble when I ignore the directions and decide to strike out on my own, so ...

Our motel lies in a lesser developed part of the west side that is rapidly becoming motel row. It's pretty new and is the nicest of the ones we stay in on the trip. The parking lot is full when we arrive, and it turns out that a bunch of FEMA guys (and as best as I can tell, they are all guys) are crammed into a small meeting room. They’ll be there when we head to the room for the night after supper, about 8:30, I think. And they’ll be at it again when we come down for breakfast in the morning 11 and a half hours later.

Wednesday, Aug. 23

Today is devoted to exploring the city, or at least the touristy version of the city. Dodge is, of course, a legendary part of the Old West, the place where Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson helped enforce the law and the setting for the long-running TV show “Gunsmoke.”

Despite the long drive around the north side of town, the drive to the center of Dodge only takes a few minutes down the main east-west street, Wyatt Earp Boulevard. They also have a Gunsmoke Street. Not that they're tourist minded at all.

School is in session, so when we pull into the parking lot in front of Boot Hill Museum, we have our choice of spots. A small street separates that lot from the one next to the tourist information center, which is also basically empty. A locomotive engine and the old railway depot, which like many of the attractions has been moved from its original location, are located near the visitor center just off Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

Me and Matt Dillon outside the visitor center.

A couple of women staff the visitor center and greet us warmly when we arrive. We want to take a one-hour tour the city runs, and you purchase tickets at the center. We’re a bit early and have to wait for the bus decked out as a trolley, so we fall into conversation with the woman staffing the reception desk.

All I need to ask to crank her up is, “What's the dumbest question you’ve been asked.” I follow that with the standard, “Understanding, of course, that there are no stupid questions.” She laughs and kids a moment about that and goes on to tell us the most common questions, adding that I can decide the dumbness of for myself.

Visitors to Dodge don’t seem to know where the OK Corral is, she says, and one man was so upset he didn’t see the corral on the tour that he took the tour-bus driver to task, telling the driver that he specifically took the tour to see the corral. The driver told him the bus didn’t go that far west.

Tourists also ask all kinds of questions about the characters from “Gunsmoke,” apparently not understanding that the characters were fictional and not based on any specific actual human. Where is Matt Dillon buried? Where is Matt and Kitty’s house? That sort of thing. At the end of our day, one of the folks who was entering the Boot Hill Museum asked us about the place and then wanted to know if Doc’s office or Marshall Dillon’s office were part of the museum.

Rather than try to explain that the museum depicted Dodge from the late 1800s not the sets from the TV show, I explain that the office of the last U.S. marshal to serve in Dodge, which he decorated to look like the TV show’s office, was there, and a doctor’s office was also part of the museum. That seemed to make him happy.

After our entertaining visit, we still have a bit of time to wait before the tour starts, so we wander about for a while. A life-sized statue of James Arness stands in a grassy area in front of the center, and I have Sharon take a picture of me standing next to it. I look small next to it. Another statue situated on Wyatt Earp Boulevard in front of the old railway depot depicts Doc Holliday sitting at a poker table, reaching for his revolver. Chairs form part of the sculpture, so you can re-enact a card game gone wrong if you want. Other statues are scattered about town, but the only other one we seek out is Wyatt Earp’s.

Sharon tried to talk Doc out of reaching for his gun.

We wound up with six or eight people on the bus for the tour. The driver was quite the card, but he didn’t do the main narration during the tour. Instead a recording by the city’s special U.S. marshal plays over a PA system. We also have a brochure with the complete text so we don’t have to remember all that information. The marshal has trouble with the pronunciation of a couple of the words, though, which makes the whole thing more interesting -- what will he mispronounce next? 

Statue of Wyatt Earp -- larger than life. He never 

used the revolver depicted while in Dodge, and

the barrel is much longer than the long-barreled

revolver he actually did use.

Dodge was and is a cattle town. After looking at the various historic buildings -- the city's first denominational church building, the whiskey distillery, etc., -- and hearing the history of the town, we ride by the feed yards filled with thousands of cows. That’s a lot of … oh, you know.

We drive by Old Fort Dodge, which has been converted to a veterans home and only has a few buildings open to the public, so we decide we won’t try to return later in the day.

Most of the rest of our day will be spent at Boot Hill Museum. Boot Hill was the highest spot in town, and still pretty much is, though the distillery dominates the view now. Boot Hill comes by its name honestly. Some 60-odd people -- the numbers vary according to the source -- mostly cowboys, were buried there before the town built a new cemetery and moved all the bodies they could identify. 

The cow punchers would often be buried with their boots on, and because they were usually buried by other cowboys who really didn’t care to put that much effort into digging a deep final resting place. That meant the departed’s boot toes often stuck out of the ground.

Depiction on Boot Hill of the shallow graves typically dug

by cowboys when burying the dead.

Part of the cemetery has been recreated in its original location. The first occupant’s grave is marked, along with a number of graves of decedents whose demises had been recorded in newspapers of the day, and the grave of the woman who was the last person to be buried there. Many of their epitaphs are recreated as well, some quite amusing.

Boot Hill was deeded to the school district after the new cemetery was built and the inhabitants had been moved. Our tour driver told us that children playing in the area would sometimes find bones, which leads to the confusion over the number of people buried there. Whether the bones were human or animal wasn’t always determined, he said.

Recreation of Lizzie Palmer's grave. Palmer was the last

person buried in Boot Hill.

Explainer about Palmer's death.

The rest of the museum is a recreation of the original business district of Dodge. The original buildings burned down in the late 1800s, were rebuilt, burned down again, and rebuilt once more as brick buildings. Boot Hill museum lies three blocks west of the the original site. Each of the buildings was built to match period photos and is decorated with period furnishings. The Long Branch saloon, possibly the only part of Dodge that appears in “Gunsmoke” that was real, is manned by a bartender and a piano player, both wearing period garb, and you can order a modern brand of beer or soft drink, including sarsparilla, which, if it's the same stuff they’ll sell you in the museum store, consists of water, sugar and artificial everything else. 

Recreation of the original main street of Dodge.

We spend the greater part of the day looking at the displays and eat a late lunch in the recreated restaurant. The food, of course, does not reflect the period, unless paninis were a feature of Old West cuisine. They served sandwiches, which were good, and modern soft drinks.

This is where the buildings above were located before

burning down twice.

One of the outdoor exhibits consists of two hand-operated water pumps. The water dumps onto a couple of wooden sluices, and we notice that a small, rubber duck lies at the end of each sluice. We quickly deduce that visitors are supposed to race each other by placing a duck at the top of the sluice and pumping water furiously. First to the end wins. I have an Obama moment and win my races -- twice.

In addition to the recreated businesses, the museum grounds contain some historical structures that have been moved from their original sites. A jail sits at the entrance to the cemetery, and a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, and the former home of one of Dodge’s prominent early families are sited at the end of the business section.

After we leave the museum, we trek a couple of blocks to see a statue of Wyatt Earp. The statue presents an idealized -- and historically inaccurate -- view of the famous lawman, who actually was a deputy sheriff, as was Bat Masterson initially, Both of them worked for Charlie Bassett. Watch enough Westerns and Bassett’s name will eventually come up. Too bad he never became the feature of a TV show.

The town also has a Trail of Fame, large circular medallions embedded in the sidewalks commemorating former residents of Dodge such as Earp, Masterson, Bassett, the “soiled dove” Big Nose Kate, and many of the actors from the “Gunsmoke” and “Bat Masterson” TV series. We don’t take the time to track them all down, but we saw many of them in front of businesses along Wyatt Earp Boulevard.

This is Earp's Walk of Fame medallion. I should have

taken a shot of the one for "Big Nose Kate," one of the

town's famed and favorite "soiled doves.

The museum usually features gunfights throughout the day, but once school starts, they scale back to one a day at 7 in the evening. After buzzing by Walmart to pick up some fruit to eat, chilling out for a bit and eating supper, we head back to the museum for the gunfight -- our tickets are good for day of the purchase and the next day.

The bad guys.

The good guy.

I’m used to gunfight recreations. They tend to feature a quickly developing conflict that will be resolved in a volley of gunfire. Loud and quick. In Dodge, one of the characters comes out about 10 minutes before the show to warm up the crowd, albeit with a bunch of groaner jokes. 

The show will last almost 20 minutes and feature bad jokes, worse acting and muffed lines. They even found a way to drag out the showdown. At half the length, it would have been better. Kinda like the adage that there’s no such thing as a bad short sermon.

After the show, the lead offers cast photos for $1 each, and the cast make themselves available to sign autographs. We buy a picture as a memento but forego the autographs. It’d be like getting autographs from the people who live three blocks over -- we don’t know them, will probably never see them again, and none of them are likely to be famous.

Back to the motel to relax and rest up for the next day’s long journey to Lubbock.