Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, as C. Robert Haywood defines it, encompassed a "ragged, imprecise triangle" with its base in the upper panhandle of Texas and its apex at Dodge City. Haywood persuasively argues that for two formative decades-1868 to 1888-this region was unified not only by "common physiographical and demographical characteristics" but by an economic interdependence that transcended state and territorial boundary lines. As a market, shipping point, and source of supply, Dodge City was the effective, if not political, capital of the region. Such remote and diverse locations as Tascosa, Texas, and Fort Supply, Oklahoma, were linked to Dodge by various wagon roads which facilitated commerce and eventually permanent settlement of the region.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:1 (Winter 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.