Dodge City, Kansas: Which Dodge Was It?

Everyone agrees that Dodge City, Kansas, took its name from Fort Dodge. Which Dodge the fort was named for is another story, and Kansas histories have given two different answers. The fort itself was an Army post a few miles down the Arkansas River.

A town next to a fort

Dodge City was laid out in July 1872, ahead of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, which reached it that September. Robert M. Wright, who was there and served as president of the town company, wrote about it in Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital (1913). He put the new town five miles west of Fort Dodge, on the north bank of the river. Other accounts say four miles. Either way, the town borrowed its name from its neighbor, and a 1912 state reference, Frank Blackmar’s Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, says so directly: “The city takes its name from old Fort Dodge.”

If you look at the 1892 government survey map above, the town is labeled simply “Dodge.” So far, no argument. The trouble starts with the fort.

Answer one: Col. Henry Dodge, 1835

A. T. Andreas, whose History of the State of Kansas came out in 1883, gives the fort a long pedigree. Col. Henry Dodge left Fort Leavenworth on May 29, 1835, on an expedition to the Rocky Mountains, and on his way back down the Arkansas, Andreas says, he “located a fort on the north side of the Arkansas, which was named Dodge.” The state historical society’s own roundup of town names, compiled for the U.S. Geological Survey’s geographer and printed in 1902, went the same way: “For Fort Dodge, named for Col. Henry Dodge.” Henry Gannett’s federal book of place names said it too, in 1902 and again in 1905: the city was “named for Gen. Henry Dodge, governor of Wisconsin Territory.”

Henry Dodge was a real frontier figure. Blackmar’s biography says he commanded the First U.S. Dragoons and later served as governor of Wisconsin.

Answer two: Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, 1864

By 1912, Blackmar was hedging. He wrote that Henry Dodge “did erect some sort of a fort in this immediate locality,” but that the reports of the U.S. War Department say “the Fort Dodge of later days was established by Gen. Grenville M. Dodge in 1864.”

Other records point the same way. An 1876 Army guide to its posts lists Fort Dodge as “Established in 1864,” and the same book shows Grenville Dodge taking command of the Department of the Missouri on December 9, 1864. Wright, writing in 1913, says the fort “was located in 1864, by General G. M. Dodge.” A Kansas Historical Society roadside marker at the site goes furthest. As quoted in search results for this article, it says the fort was “named for Maj. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge” and established in 1865.

Notice what the older books do and don’t say, though. Blackmar and Wright both credit Grenville Dodge with establishing the fort. Neither one says in so many words that it was named for him. The marker does, but it’s a roadside sign put up by the state, not an Army record, and its 1865 date doesn’t match the 1864 in the others.

So which Dodge?

The evidence leans toward Grenville Dodge. The fort that gave the town its name was a post of the 1860s, and the Army’s own records date it to 1864, nearly 30 years after Henry Dodge’s expedition. Still, you can see why the other answer stuck around: the two oldest Kansas sources here, Andreas in 1883 and the historical society’s own 1902 list, both name Henry Dodge, and Gannett’s federal list repeated it.

Then there’s a third Dodge. When the town company formed in 1872, Wright says one of its members was Col. Richard I. Dodge, who was commanding Fort Dodge at the time. Nobody in these sources claims the town was named for him. He’s just one more Dodge in a story that already had two.

Sources & further reading

• A. T. Andreas, History of the State of Kansas (1883), Ford County, p. 1560. Henry Dodge’s 1835 expedition and the fort “named Dodge.”
• Kansas State Historical Society, “Origin of City Names,” Collections, vol. 7 (1902), p. 477. “For Fort Dodge, named for Col. Henry Dodge.”
• Frank W. Blackmar, ed., Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, vol. 1 (1912). Dodge City “takes its name from old Fort Dodge” (p. 523); Henry Dodge’s career (pp. 524–525); the War Department’s credit to Grenville M. Dodge for the fort of 1864 (p. 659).
• Robert M. Wright, Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital (1913). The town laid out in July 1872, the town company with Col. Richard I. Dodge (p. 9 and pp. 337–338), and the fort “located in 1864, by General G. M. Dodge” (p. 339).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1902), p. 95, and 2nd ed. (1905), p. 107. Dodge City “named for Gen. Henry Dodge, governor of Wisconsin Territory.”
• Outline Descriptions of the Posts in the Military Division of the Missouri (1876). Fort Dodge “Established in 1864,” and Grenville Dodge’s command of the Department of the Missouri from December 9, 1864.
• Kansas Historical Marker No. 75, Fort Dodge. “Named for Maj. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge” and established in 1865. Read through search results only, not on the marker database page itself.
• GNIS feature 485363 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Dodge City.