"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

I thought about suggesting to Daniel that we come to ground here. Kansas City
was probably the last place we would see that would have anything like the amenities we
were accustomed to. But the aim of our flight was to wind up at "the ends of the earth,"
where Edward would never find us. And I harbored the hope that after we had hidden out
for a few years, we might return to civilization, east or west.
We rested for a day, strolling. We crossed the bridge over to Kansas City, Kansas.
The smell of the stockyards and packinghouses could turn one into a vegetarian.
I went into several pawnshops in both Missouri and Kansas, having my wedding
ring appraised. One of the Missouri ones offered $250, fifty dollars more than anybody
else, so I took it back there and sold it. I suppose it was worth twice as much, at least, but
I was glad to be rid of it. The ruby necklace I had traded a tooth for brought another
hundred.
The next day, we boarded the morning train to Topeka, where we picked up the
branch to Dodge City.
Miles and miles of grain, and then desolate, untamed prairie from horizon to
horizon. Daniel stared out the window for hours on end, ignoring the book in his lap. I let
him be. He had probably expected something more interesting.
A few years before, Dodge City had been the epitome of the wild and wooly west.
The town literally started as a saloon. Fort Dodge had been in place since 1865, an
outpost that protected pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail. In 1872, a Canadian named George
Hoover showed up with a wagonload of whiskey, knowing that liquor was not allowed
within five miles of the fort. He measured out five miles down the trail, set up a tent, and
made a bar out of a board and two stacks of sod. That became the town.
There's a popular radio show now, Gunsmoke, that purports to be about Dodge
City in the early days, but it's far too wholesome. The town had two periods of
prosperity. The first one was from 1872 to 1876, when the town was called Buffalo City,
and was the West's main shipping point for buffalo hides and meat. Millions of the
animals were killed by men who essentially sat in one place and shot them like fish in a
barrel, until they were exterminated.
It was a very rough town then. Seventeen people were killed in shoot-outs the
first year of its existence, most in the "no man's land" south of the railroad tracks. North
of the tracks, even then, it was illegal to carry a gun.
Dodge might have died with the buffaloes if not for a legislative action that made
it "Queen of the Cowtowns," a dubious distinction. Texas longhorns used to be driven
every year to railheads in Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita—but it turned out the Texas
cows were killing the Kansas ones. They carried a tick to which they were immune, but
which caused a killing fever in the local cattle.
The Kansas legislature established a quarantine line that protected those three
cities, and by default gifted Dodge with the annual visit of a quarter of a million tick-
infested cattle. Along with the cows came cowboys, of course—and gunmen, card sharps,
prostitutes, and whoever else might make a dollar off these bored and tired and reckless
men.
It only lasted ten years. In 1885, the quarantine was extended to include the whole
state. Dodge had its own cattle by then, presumably immune to the tick disease—but the
winter of '85/'86 was one long blizzard, which all but destroyed the industry.
When our train pulled into town nine years later, Dodge was still a cowtown
without many cows. (I called the Chamber of Commerce in 1951, and they reluctantly
admitted that the bovine population was still under the 1885 level.) But there were
people, and the people had children, and the children needed teachers.
I had hoped to sit down with some frontier rustics and sweep them off their feet