Be sure to visit www.santafetrail.org/geocaching to learn about the PASSPORT ACTIVITY to accompany this Geo Tour. The historic first Dodge House was on the northwest corner of Front St. and Railroad Ave. (now Central) across from the Santa Fe Depot, and it housed 38 rooms, a restaurant, saloon and billiard hall, and was the largest hotel in western Kansas. Many well-known individuals, including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Dave Mather and Luke Short, resided at the Dodge House. Doc Holliday ran a dentist office during the summer of 1878 in room number 24. The Dodge House was the site of many incidents, including shootings. On June 27, 1890, a fire, which started in one of the owners, a George B. Cox’s room, partially destroyed the Dodge House. What was left standing served as a restaurant and over the next few years what remained of the original hotel was razed. Other Dodge City hotels have taken the name Dodge House. In 1897, A.H. Boyd changed the name of the Oriel Hotel to Dodge House. He operated this hotel until 1900 when he removed the furnishings to a hotel in Marion, Kans. Ernest Hendricks and a Mrs. Morrow bought the Hotel and Morrow turned it into a boarding house in 1905. There is no other documentation of the “Dodge House” until 1956 or 1957, when in response to the popularity of the TV show, “Gunsmoke,” E.A. Brown renamed a hotel on Wyatt Earp Blvd the Dodge House. This building was torn down in 1970 during Urban Renewal. Around 1973, today’s incarnation of the Dodge House at 2408 West Wyatt Earp opened.
On the south side of the street from this cache is a Kansas Historical Society Marker as well as a DAR marker, one of the markers set by the Kansas Daughters of the American Revolution.
Founded in 1890, the Daughters of the American Revolution, is a non-political, non-profit, volunteer women’s organization serving to promote patriotism, preserve American history, and secure America’s future through better education for children.
In 1902, Kansas Daughters began their dream of service to Kansas history by kicking off a campaign to place markers along the Santa Fe Trail in the state. They secured red granite boulders of varying size for the markers, at a cost of about $16 per boulder and by late 1906 were installing them. One hundred years later, (then) State Regent Shirley S. Coupal chose as her project to survey all the DAR markers on the Sante Fe Trail in Kansas and make whatever repairs were necessary to allow them to proudly stand for another century. Deteriorated bases were repaired, the stones cleaned, and lettering was refurbished. One of the first buildings built in Dodge City, Kansas was the Dodge House Hotel. Of Western fame, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were frequent guests, and in 1878 Doc Holliday even had his practice in Room 24 of The Dodge House. Although the historic building is long gone, today you can experience the “Old West” at the current Dodge House Hotel. SFTA thanks the management for generously allowing us to place one of our caches at this location.
Containers on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail Geo Tour are varied and may include military ammunition canisters, medium-sized Bison Tube, small plastic containers, or Brochure-Holder boxes, with an identifying Santa Fe Trail Association yellow sticker on the outside of the box. A geocaching.com ID is located on the side of the boxes with the information that provides coordinates, who set the cache and who to contact for information. Each cache contains a logbook to sign, a variety of items that provide information about the Santa Fe Trail as well as swag items. If you are participating in the Passport activity, the code word is located on the inside of the box, on the top of the lid and is clearly identified as Code Word. Permission to set caches has been obtained. We ask that all cachers please respect all property at the sites where our caches are set.