Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra

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Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra | The Circle Dot Cowboys at Dodge City: History and Imagination in Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.1 | The History Cooperative

The Circle Dot Cowboys at Dodge City:
History and Imagination in Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy

Andy Adams's famous 1903 novel, The Log of a Cowboy, includes a chapter set in Dodge City that is an especially interesting example of the mixed fact and fancy that has traditionally characterized western fiction. Remarkably, Adams appears to provide otherwise missing information on Dodge's 1882 experiment in "reform law-enforcement."

     In the third week of June 1882, seven Texas cowboys from an outfit grazing cattle on Duck Creek in southwest Kansas set out for nearby Dodge City. Like hundreds of cowhands and cattlemen before them, these Circle Dot men intended to "see the elephant." Originally referring to the main attraction of any mid-nineteenth-century circus, the elephant reference was strictly metaphorical, meaning a unique sight or spectacle. ¹ Here it specifically alluded to the gaudy entertainments of one of the most notorious towns in America. Famous from coast to coast as a major western livestock market, Dodge City was equally celebrated and widely condemned for its all-night bars, gaming tables, dance halls, brothels, and general civic irregularity--all seasoned by the town's highly overblown reputation for gun violence. ² In the 1870s and 1880s, seemingly every cowboy ascending the Western Trail felt obliged to stop and ogle the excitement, if not actually participate in it. ³ 1

     On the June day in question, the Circle Dot cowboys rode into Dodge City at approximately 9:00 a.m. Some fifteen hours later they galloped out again--six-shooters blazing and hostile bullets whining about their ears. They had indeed seen the elephant and congratulated themselves on having escaped unscathed. 2

     Their story appeared in 1903 as chapter thirteen of ex-trailhand Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy. ⁴ From the first, a surprising number of readers and reviewers assumed it to be nonfiction. ⁵ As recently as the mid-1990s, nationally published authors continued to refer to the book as a cowboy memoir. ⁶ Scholars, however, have long recognized that the work, which is narrated not by Adams himself but by a Georgia-born cowboy named Thomas Moore Quirk, is what its author intended: a novel. ⁷

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