by Mari Sandoz
Dodge City, with the breaker bottom and the backset plow, had produced 75,000 bushels of wheat in the region and seemed very tame, particularly after the news that four men accused of robbery had been dragged out down at Medicine Lodge and left hanging in a neat row. Apparently the best Dodge could do now was an occasional spite range fire and a hard winter, nothing to compete for even the tenderfoot. The businessmen, however weren't giving up. They planned the biggest crowd roundup of all time. Their saloons were still running, but under pending action to close them, troublesome yet perhaps a little cheaper than the licenses they paid in legal days. Hoping they could stay open a while longer, former Mayor Webster raised $10,000 for a two-day bullfight the Fourth of July. The newspapers all over the nation picked it up, spread it out with big stories of the sins of Dodge as though these were still true. Moore, a Scottish attorney at Paso del Norte, Mexico, was hired to find matadors and to sell the idea that the fight was not brutal and bloody as many thought it, but to make it somehow even more exciting. The men would use no weapons ex- cept the small darts and the skill and dexterity with which man can evade the angry bull, making it sound very hazardous and bloody.
For this "First genuine bullfight on American soil," meaning since it was part of the United States, Doc Barton was chosen to pick the bulls. He knew the region since as a soft-bearded young man he drove the first beef herd up to Dodge in 1872. By the end of June he had twelve bulls in the hastily built arena, out at the fairgrounds, all adequately ugly, pawing at any approach and charging against the corral walls so the planks bent and the braces outside cracked and buckled. People gathered to look, a few women with parasols, but even the men keeping well back, codding Doc and his cowboys a little.
"Going to give the bulls a few of those toadstickers, too?" someone asked, the watchers laughing, already against the Mexican fighters coming in, aliens, opposing fellow citizens.
Much money was staked on the animals, with the customary drinks all around. Once more Dodge found the horned ruminant her mainstay as she had from the start: the buffalo, the ox of the freighters, the Longhorn, the growing importance of the Shorthorn, and now the bull of the arena. Posters went up everywhere, mostly of the fighters in their fancied outfits, slapped on walls and building fronts. A few wanted pictures of a big red Longhorn range sire somewhere, but that brought up the Bull's Head at Abilene and the killings that caused. Too many church members here now anyway, and no colorful characters like those of Abilene around, no Wild Bill Hickok left, not even a Phil Coe.
The local newspaper ran stories of Mexican bullfighters, their fierceness and polished courage, their narrow escapes, so narrow that all the men were badly wounded many times. They all expected to die in the arena, yet they were temperate men; none drank strong liquor and all had regular occupations. Captain Gallardo, the chief of the matadors, was a tailor in Chihuahua but the most famous bull- fighter of Mexico, nevertheless. Many southern cattlemen sent word they had seen him kill bulls at Paso del Norte. His two-edged Toledo blades were three feet long; one was one hundred and fifty years old, the blade of his great-grandfather, a famous bullfighter of Spain. The other four men were an inspector of public works, his artist son, and two musicians.
Visitors piled into Dodge. The railroad brought carloads of them from the east to crowd the hotels and the Pullmans and empty boxcars set off on sidings. Ranchers and even some settlers camped out on the old hide-staking, cattle-tromped bottoms, with covered wagons, tents, or merely bedrolls dropped beside the saddle, for even now petty thievery had not come to Dodge. Horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, murderers, these were plentiful, but only settled civilization brought the petty thief, the need for locks.
Cowboys came, too, only around 500, but in white Stetsons, double-breasted flannel shirts, some in chaps, all handsomely booted and spurred, with money in the pocket. All morning of the Fourth side-lamped carriages, buggies, buckboards, and lumber wagons arrived, some with boards across the bed for seats, or perhaps a dozen children on the hay in the bottom. There were many, many horsebackers, and some men afoot, even a few women, all moving across the shimmering heat of the July prairie into Dodge.
The streets were jammed so no one could be found, few could move. The saloons boomed, gambling games ran full blast as they seldom did since the buffalo-hide days. Metropolitan correspondents came early. Some worked hard to revive the old colorful characters, real or imagined, writing of them as though they were still there. One even forgot that Wild Bill lay buried up at Deadwood for eight years and had him striding the night of Dodge, his cape thrown back to show the red-plaid lining. But there wasn't a gun anywhere except on the officers, not a shot boomed out without a swift trip to the cooler, no cannon cracker popped, and no cowboy spurred up and down the streets picking out the lights or lassoing, without partiality, the red-globed lamps down south of the tracks and the clear white one before the Methodist Church. The correspondents complained that the only profane language they heard was from an old woman in a Mother Hubbard. However, a couple of old dance-hall girls, of the Fairy Belles years ago, and hopeful before they hit town, really smoked up the air when they saw the handsome, high-busted, wasp-waisted young women imported for the entertainment at this great festival.
By now the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had appealed to the governor of Kansas and brought, for one bad hour, a rumor that the governor would surely stop the fight. The businessmen faced staggering losses and infuriated guests, including the cowboys, with no telling how many would suddenly sprout angry guns. Fortunately the messages and the letter to the governor met with some unaccountable delay.
But Dodge had her own dissenters. One minister prayed publicly that the town be spared this "stench in the nostrils of civilization" and worried some of the businessmen. But everything was wasted on Webster and his colleagues. It was said that the mayor received a telegram from the attorney general's office reminding him that bullfighting was against the law in the United States. He merely snorted "Hell, Dodge City ain't in the United States."
Finally the hour of the bullfight came, with no officials to stop it. The fairgrounds, forty acres along the bottoms between town and the river, had a race track and an amphitheater that seated around 4,000. A hundred-foot arena was laid out before the grandstand, the plank walls eight feet high, with eight screened escape slots for the bullfighters when pushed too hard, if it came to that, and two escape ladders. To the west was the bull corral with a chute leading into the arena, and an alleyway alongside wide enough for the horses to drag the dead bulls away.
So there was to be killing—
The seats were packed early, almost one third of the spectators women and children, the former of both kinds that Dodge afforded, with a deputy sheriff delegated to keep them separated. Somehow he managed, perhaps because he knew all the dance-hall girls and those who ran their own little business in shacks along the river. A wife or two did elbow her high-nosed way out because she had been seated too close to her husband's mistress. There was a little disturbance among the others, too, with a little hair pulling, but quickly settled, the section gay in plumed hats and fluttering laces.
Inside, opposite the leading citizens, were the cowboys and their girls, many taking the highest seats possible, with the most flamboyant companions possible. It was a gay, boisterous crowd, with joking cowmen calling to each other across the stretches of sweating spectators, their voices carrying well from long years of shouting against the wind, but lost in the growing noise of the cowboys and their roar "Bring on the bulls!"
The animals were herded in, the tips of their horns sawed off and rasped smooth, while a bullfighter in a red cape helped horsemen handle them.
Around two o'clock Webster and the promoter led the little parade of notables over the dusty, unshaded road from town, followed by Beeson's Cowboy Band, tootling and drumming fiercely, their instruments gleaming fire-hot in the bright Kansas sun. They heralded the colorful bullfighters on horse
s gleaming satin but soon dusty, too.
Finally the entry trumpet blew and the white-hosed bullfighters marched into the ring. Gallardo, with a green sash to set off his embroidered scarlet jacket and knee breeches and the red and gold of his cape, Rivas in yellow with red, and a white cape with horns. The other two were in red and blue, the picadors, dressed like any Mexican cowboy, rode behind them. So they marched around the arena, bowing to the officials and their ladies, the little queues under the cornered black hats bobbing, their dark faces un- moved by the hoots of the northern cowboys already too deep in celebration. Deliberately, gracefully, the bullfighters moved, their black pumps sending up little spurts of fine dust under their firm tread.
When the arena was empty, a second trumpet brought out a big, red, fierce-looking bull. As he leaped through the entrance the streamer-decorated banderillas were flung into his neck from both sides to sting and enrage him, send him charging at the outflung cape of Gallardo as he stepped out and began to play the fluttering red cloth, lead the bull to make lunges at him, luring him from his course by the live, fluttering cape, standing unmoving as the horns passed and struck at the unresisting folds that flapped over the bull's angry eyes while the crowd roared, although some who had seen the fighting of Spain waited.
The bull didn't have quite the forward set of horn of the old Castilian fighting blood brought to Texas long ago, or the force of shoulder. Besides, he was too long in the leg for the proper beauty and grace in this formal dance of the power of the bull against the feather lightness of the cape, symbolizing the bold spirit of man against the darkness, the evil.
"I think of it as a dance, not with evil—but with God," one man protested, an American, but in a crumpled white linen suit and an African explorer's hat. "A sort of wrestling with God—"
"God?—dragged in on such a killing?" a cowboy behind the man cut in as he would head an escaping cow back into the herd. "My father is a missionary and he would protest this as savage, brutal, and bloody."
The man in the white suit turned around to look the trail-gaunted youth over. "You are, perhaps, forgetting the symbolic partaking of the blood and the body of God?— pure cannibalistic survival, one way or another practiced in many religious rites," he said.
But before the cowboy could answer his neighbor nudged his ribs, yelling, "Looks like the bull's put the run on 'im!"
It was true that the matador was fleeing for the nearest escape slot, the bull hard after him, kicking up dust, head down, right at the flying heels, the picador spurring in, another of the fighters running up with a challenging cape.
"There's where you need a good gun on you, and a fast draw," someone told the man in the white suit, leaning far forward past several spectators to say it.
Down in the arena the bull tried to butt into the narrow opening and then circled the ring, head up, eyes and ears alert, searching, and finally stood out in the center, nose up and flaring, tail switching, the banderillas flopping, their flags streaming as he pawed the earth, throwing showers of dust over his forequarters, with a roaring deep in his throat that was his challenge to a rival, to the enemy that his keen nose smelled all around him here.
Now each time Gallardo taunted the bull with his cape, the charge, the horns, came a little closer, still closer, until it seemed each time the horns passed the man's lean thigh that it must have been more than what it seemed, a caress, that the flesh must have been torn, and the stands whooped. But always the man stood unmoving, untouched.
When the matador finally slipped away again, the other three closed in. The dusty bull charged them, one after another, but no matter how swiftly and fiercely he lunged and wheeled, he could not catch them any more than the will-o'-the-wisps rising from the rotting bogs of the Arkansas. More and more darts were flung into his back, until the sticks and the fluttering streamers reached from horn to tail and drops of blood jumped down his dusty sides. The stands yelled for the kill, all except a few around the man in the white suit. Considering that the bull was fresh from a range herd, he fought hard and the matador worked with skill and agility enough, and with a deftness and courage particularly surprising in this new country, for wasn't such a spectacle more fitted to a dying era, the man in the white suit suggested.
At the end of half an hour the bull seemed tired and a cowboy was signaled in to rope him and drag him out. This stirred up the ranch hands who longed to have their kind of skill displayed, too, yelling, "Throw him, cowboy! Bust 'im flat!"
The roper tried but the bull was too strong to be pulled down and too tired and tamed to go against the rope hard enough to throw himself. Finally he had to be dragged out, bloody, dust-caked, the streamered darts shaking as the big animal pulled back until his wind was cut off. In the gate he charged the horse, grazing the unprotected ribs, and then broke back into the ring, to the whooping of his partisans, to be dragged out again.
Now the crowd kept up the roaring for a real fight to the finish, but the next bull fled the matador as his ancestors down on the Trinity once took to the brush at the sight of man. He ran frantically back and forth where he felt the gate must be, reaching his eager nose up and down, then trying to climb the plank wall and falling back, so with the hoots and the whistles of the Mexicans he was let out. The third bull had little more fight in him, and the fourth the same. But the fifth was the worst of all. In his desperate attempt to escape the thick and frightening smell of man, he got jammed into one of the escape slots, unable to go ahead or back out. A cowboy in the front row above him flapped his white hat in the bull's dusty, blinking face, then kicked him in the head with his spurred heel. Finally the bull got himself loose and fled to the cattle pen amid jeers and the piercing whistles and a tootling from the band.
Almost before he was gone the crowd was whooping for a return of the first bull. Because, contrary to the first publicity, it was later announced that Gallardo would kill the last bull of the day with his sword, the crowd wanted to see it done. So the red bull was turned back into the arena and the Toledo blade handed down to the matador with the little cape now, the muleta.
Everybody who knew anything about bullfighting realized Gallardo must incite the bull to charge again and again until the right moment for the death thrust came. The bull must run up on the sword held directly above his lowered attacking horns, the matador standing firm and unflinching for the thrust that would, it was hoped, kill the bull before he reached the man. Even those who knew nothing of this moment of chilling solemnity, this supreme moment, were suddenly quiet. The bull, angrier, fiercer now than ever, charged. Gallardo swept him past with the muleta across the blade. The great dusty red animal was much too large for the ring but he wheeled easily and charged again, his horns buried in the slipping folds of red cloth. Each time Gallardo drew him closer upon himself, closer and closer, and if the grace, the purity was not quite there, it was plain that the horns barely missed the man's thigh and a little above. Once more, not far from one of the escape places, the muleta went out and came back, this time in very close, unhurried. The bull plunged forward, to the cries of alarm as the matador seemed to stumble, then went down, to a great gasp of horror all around, some clapping their hands over their eyes to shut out the bull butting his great horns downward.
But Gallardo had thrown himself lengthwise between the horns as they rammed into the earth, and as the bull jerked back, he slid to safety behind the open wall with the movement of a snake.
The bull had brought blood from the thigh and, doubly infuriated now, he nearly tore the escape down to get at the man. Finally he backed off, but fiercely, tail switching a little, head up, bloodshot eyes rolling, poised as a panther.
Although his left thigh was grazed, the red of the trousers dark—streaked to the bloodied white hose, his clothing torn—Gallardo stepped out again, this time to try for the finish. The crowd roared for him now, even many of the cowboys as they stomped their boots and cheered his bow. The matador signaled the band to repeat the music for the kill. To its br
assy beat he walked directly toward the bull, the muleta over the thin, shining steel out and aimed above where the lowered horns would be. But the bull did not come, and so Gallardo showed him the naked blade, carried it to him, and finally the animal charged but without the opening the fighter needed. The muleta swung into play and once more, twice more, the bull went past, but very close, drawn upon the man as the crowd held its breath, and then applauded. Again and again Gallardo made the approach and finally the bull came just right. The thin, swift steel pierced the vital spot at arm's length, blood gushing. The bull's momentum slowed, he stumbled, went to his knees and down almost upon his head, his horns striking the ground beside the steady, the impersonal black slippers of the fighter. He lay still, and the crowd, gone silent, burst into cheers now, in a cheering that rose up in a great spreading wave with even a few of the Mexicans crying their "Ole! Ole!" the people up, stamping and whooping until the rickety rows of seats threatened to collapse, and the mayor held up both hands for quiet, for a steadying.
Now the first day's bullfight at Dodge was done, the first on United States soil.
There seemed general satisfaction over the town that night. "The punishment, the tortures, and the cruelty were even less than that inflicted upon animals in the branding pen," the Ford County Globe reported. The night was a gaudy one and the next day the fighting was much as before, except that the kill of the last animal was a little more interesting, perhaps because many knew more of what to expect and gave the matador more encouragement to show what bullfighting meant. Some of the cattlemen from the Southwest had seen other, better fights. The man in the white linen suit, who turned out to be from the State Department with years of residence in the legation in Spain under Dan Sickles, kept silent. He was out to look after his British wife's ranch interests and wanted no trouble.