Emanuel Dubbs Story
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Emanuel Dubbs, pioneer, minister, and county judge was born on March 21, 1843, on a farm near New Franklin, Ohio, the youngest of the six children of Daniel and Elizabeth (Meckley) Dubbs. After the war, he moved to Elkhart County, Indiana, and engaged in the lumber business with his brother. Emanuel married Angeline Freed in 1868. After a fire destroyed his sawmill in 1871, Dubbs and his wife moved to Kansas.
For a short time, he was located in the Santa Fe Railroad construction department, which was then building through southwestern Kansas. This brought him, in 1871, to the noted frontier town of Dodge City, in which place he helped build the first house and brought his family there. Dodge City was then starting on its career as the roughest frontier town of the United States. During the first years of his residence, there vast herds of buffalo roamed over the prairie, and after a short time, Mr. Dubbs made a business of killing the buffalo for their meat and hides. With his associates, he established buffalo camps and carried on an extensive industry in curing buffalo meat and shipping it to the market. |
In 1874 he took part in the Indian war, as a scout assisting the federal troops under General Miles to put down the uprising of the Cheyennes. After this Indian fighting, he moved southward from Kansas and established buffalo camps in what was then “No Man’s Land,” now Beaver County, Oklahoma, his headquarters being on the Cimarron River where he spent the winter of 1874 - 75.
The following audio recordings is the factual stories based on Emanuel Dubbs book “Pioneer Days in the Southwest.” The following stories have been rewritten by Michael King and are narrated by by Brad Smalley. The Emanuel Dubbs story is a personal account of the pioneer days found in Chapter 2 entitled Personal Reminiscences p 30 – 38. Pioneer days in the Southwest takes into account the life in Southwest Kansas from 1850 to 1879. In this thrilling podcast listeners will experience descriptions of buffalo hunting along the Arkansas River, the Newton Hyde Park gunfight, cowboy life in Dodge City Kansas and the Billy Brooks story.
Gunfight at Hyde ParkPart One: Emanuel Dubbs Story
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In the spring of 1871 we, that is wife and I, concluded to follow Horace Greeley's advice and move west, for we had lost our little fortune in a fire. We made the trip with a mover's outfit, a covered wagon, a pair of mules, small tent, camp ing outfit, etc., and one evening we pulled into the then outside frontier town of Newton, Kansas, the end of the track of the Santa Fe and Atchison railroad. We did not intend to stop only long enough to purchase supplies, as we had taken a contract of grading work on the line between the Little and Big Arkansas rivers near the town of Hutchinson, Kansas, which was not then in existence.
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My Mule MariePart Two: Emanuel Dubbs Story
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Many interesting things happened while doing contract work on the grade, which in a work of this kind I think do not directly apply to pioneer ing. I will pass over the time to the spring of '72. Sometime in the month of June, myself and the head contractor, Mr. Wiley, and another gentle man, whose name I have forgotten, traveled up the line from old Fort Larned over what was then known as the Dry Ridge trail. Coming out in sight of the beautiful Arkansas valley about two miles above where old Fort Dodge then stood, a panorama opened up to our view that was most beautiful.
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A New Bully in Town
Among the many lawless characters, who in the beginning drifted into Dodge City, was Billy Brooks. Brooks was a shabby character sporting a narrow mustache with a long rounded face trimmed out with a Van Dyke goatee. Brooks roamed about the town in a dark cloth coat. He brandished two revolvers well in sight of those he chose to intimidate. He wore a tall circular crowned black hat supported by a collarless linen shirt. This slipshod dress gave the appearance to everyone who regarded him as a dangerous.
