Dodge City
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40 free Dodge City trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Dodge City, Kansas, is one of the most storied towns of the American Old West. In little more than a decade it grew from a lone ranch house beside a wagon road into a booming cattle market, with a reputation for gamblers, gunmen and lawmen that Hollywood has been retelling ever since. This quiz collects the fun facts people most often look up about Dodge City: how the town got its name, what the first settlers traded, who kept the peace, which screen stories made it famous, and what visitors can see there now. A few questions cover the geography, climate and industries of the modern town. It is written for Kansas classrooms, trivia nights, road-trippers planning a stop and anyone who enjoys Old West history. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind each fact as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which long-running CBS Western, starring James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon, was set in Dodge City, Kansas?
Gunsmoke
Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons on television, and in 1959 Dodge City renamed its downtown Walnut Street after the show.
Q 02Dodge City, staked out just ahead of the arriving railroad, took its name from what kind of nearby site?
An army fort
An army fort five miles to the east, Fort Dodge, lent the town its name after the settlers' first choice turned out to be taken by another Kansas town.
Q 03Sitting on the open High Plains, Dodge City, Kansas, is often cited as which superlative among US cities?
Windiest
Windiest is the label Dodge City often gets, thanks to an average wind speed of 13.9 mph that can whip even light snowfalls into blizzards.
Q 04In 2009, Dodge City, Kansas, became home to the first state-owned example of what in the United States?
A casino
A casino named Boot Hill opened that December under Kansas ownership, borrowing its Old West theme from the town's famous frontier cemetery.
Q 05Settlers first named Dodge City after which animal, whose hides and bones made the early town rich?
Buffalo
Buffalo City was the settlers' first pick, but another Kansas town already had the name. An estimated 1.5 million hides shipped out of Dodge City between 1872 and 1878.
Q 06By town founder Robert Wright's account, what served as the first jail in Dodge City for sobering up drunks?
A deep well
A deep well, about fifteen feet down, held drunks who were lowered in and left until they sobered up. Wright recalled that it sometimes held several men at once.
Q 07Which actor, who directed and starred in the counterculture film Easy Rider, was born in Dodge City, Kansas?
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City in 1936. Easy Rider was his first film as a director, written with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern.
Q 08What Spanish-style spectacle, with performers brought in from Mexico, did Dodge City stage in July 1884?
A bullfight
A bullfight held over the Fourth of July is remembered as the first real one staged in the United States, with the matadors actually using their swords.
Q 09In cattle-era Dodge City, what could not be carried north of the railroad tracks known as the deadline?
Firearms
Firearms were banned north of the tracks by city ordinance, while the south side stayed wide open. In 1877 the town of 1,200 people had 19 businesses licensed to sell liquor.
Q 10The phrase 'get out of Dodge', inspired by Westerns set in Dodge City, urges a person to do what?
Leave somewhere fast
To leave somewhere fast is to get out of Dodge, a phrase traced to screen lawmen ordering villains out of the frontier town.
Q 11A bronze statue in Dodge City honors which assistant marshal who later fought at the O.K. Corral?
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp was appointed assistant marshal around May 1876, just as the Texas cattle herds began arriving in force.
Q 12Doc Holliday, who arrived in Dodge City in 1878, had earned his nickname with a degree in which field?
Dentistry
Dentistry was Holliday's trade: he graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery at 20, before tuberculosis and gambling pulled him west.
Q 13Which river, whose name Kansans pronounce differently from the state that shares it, flows past Dodge City, Kansas?
Arkansas
The Arkansas River, which locals pronounce 'Are-Kansas', guided thousands of freight wagons west along its north bank. Coronado's expedition is said to have crossed it in 1541.
Q 21Which sheriff based in Dodge City, elected by three votes in 1877, later became a New York sports columnist?
Bat Masterson
Bat Masterson spent his last years covering boxing for the New York Morning Telegraph and died at his desk in 1921 after writing a final column.
Q 22Dodge City earned which regal nickname in its boom years of the 1870s and 1880s?
Queen of the Cowtowns
Queen of the Cowtowns fit after 1876, when Kansas moved its quarantine line west and cut rivals such as Wichita out of the trade.
Q 23George M. Hoover opened the very first business in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1872, a bar selling what?
Whiskey
Q 14Which industry is the biggest employer in modern Dodge City, Kansas?
Meatpacking
Meatpacking dominates the local economy: Cargill and National Beef both run large plants and are the town's two biggest employers.
Q 15Which swashbuckling star played a cattle agent turned sheriff in the 1939 Technicolor Western Dodge City?
Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn worried that audiences would not accept him in a Western, yet the film was a big hit and held its premiere in the real Kansas town.
Q 16Which steel magnate paid for the first public library building in Dodge City, now an arts center?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie funded the library, which opened in 1907. After the library outgrew it, the building became the Carnegie Center for the Arts, home of the local arts council.
Q 17On July 4, 1914, Dodge City hosted the first 300-mile world championship race for which machines?
Motorcycles
Motorcycles kept racing at Dodge City into the 1950s, and company founders William Harley and Walter Davidson were among those who came to the first race.
Q 18El Capitan, a life-sized bronze sculpture in Dodge City honoring the old trail drives, depicts what?
A longhorn steer
A longhorn steer in bronze marks the end of the trail for the millions of Texas cattle that were driven north to the town's railhead.
Q 19Wagon ruts preserved as a National Historic Landmark west of Dodge City were left by traffic on which route?
Santa Fe Trail
The Santa Fe Trail, opened by trader William Becknell in 1821, left two miles of ruts here, the longest clearly defined stretch surviving in Kansas.
Q 20The Dodge City Roundup, centerpiece of the ten-day Dodge City Days festival each summer, is what kind of event?
A rodeo
A rodeo, the Dodge City Roundup, anchors the festival alongside a parade, concerts, a beauty pageant and a golf tournament.
Whiskey came first: Hoover's bar was open for business before the railroad reached town that September, and he later served as mayor.
Q 24Rancher Henry Sitler put up the first building on the site of Dodge City in 1871 using which material?
Sod
Sod formed the walls of Sitler's three-room house, built to oversee his cattle ranch, and it soon became a regular stop for hunters and traders.
Q 25After the bodies were moved from Boot Hill cemetery in Dodge City, what was built on the hilltop?
A schoolhouse
A schoolhouse went up on Boot Hill as the town worked to shed its violent image, and the graves were shifted to the new Prairie Grove Cemetery.
Q 26Amtrak's daily train through Dodge City, Kansas, runs between Chicago and which West Coast city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is the western end of the line. The train calls at an 1890s Dodge City depot that once had its own Harvey House lunchroom and dining room.
Q 27Dodge City hosts a Kansas hall of fame, billed as the first of its kind, honoring which profession?
Teachers
Teachers get their due downtown, where the hall of fame mounts exhibits on education in Kansas, a quiet contrast to the gunfighter attractions nearby.
Q 28Dodge City, Kansas, about 150 miles west of Wichita, sits in which corner of the state?
Southwest
Southwest Kansas is where Dodge City sits, roughly 150 miles from Wichita, 200 from Amarillo and 300 from Denver.
Q 29Quarantine laws pushed the cattle trade west to Dodge City because Texas herds carried which fever-spreading pests?
Ticks
Ticks riding north on Texas herds spread a fever among local cattle, so farmers lobbied the legislature for quarantine lines that moved steadily west.
Q 30Press coverage of the 1883 Dodge City War led newspapers to compare the Kansas town with which Biblical city?
Sodom
Sodom of the West became a tag for the town as national coverage of the saloon dispute fed the legend of frontier lawlessness.