Walk Into the Past - Caldwell, KS
Posted by: 
YoSam.
N 37° 02.016 W 097° 36.426
14S E 623883 N 4099506
You start a "A" Street and Main St., nice corner and a good place to start walking through a rough cow town.
Waymark Code: WMQ71B
Location: Kansas, United States
Date Posted: 01/01/2016
Views: 15
County of tour: Sumner County
Location of tour: Caldwell Kansas
WALK INTO THE PAST
AND
READ A COWTOWN HISTORY
IN
CALDWELL, KANSAS
The City of Caldwell invites you to relive the days when gunfighters, saloons, and Texas longhorns occupied our Main Street As one of only six Kansas Cowtowns, Caldwell is preserving its rich heritage with new and very impressive historic markers in its downtown area.
Each of the twenty sites has an exciting, descriptive story of a cowtown incident or location. Local historians are continually selecting, researching, documenting and marking new sites.
1.) 101 N. Main St. ~ Southwestern Hotel
2.) 17 N. Main St. ~ Henry Newton Brown
3.) 1 N. Main St. ~ Shooting Up Main Street
4.) 14 N. Central Ave. ~ Cowtown Law Enforcement
5.) 3 S. Main St. ~ Last Chance Saloon
6.) 25 S. Main St. ~ The Leland Hotel
7.) 103 S. Main St. ~ The Stock Exchange Bank
8.) 127 S. Main St. ~ The Grand Opera House
9.) 124 S. Main St. ~ Gunfire Kills Lawman
10.) 102 S. Main St. ~ this marker has been updated with a new marker titled Caldwell "The Border Queen"
11.) 30 S. Main St. ~ Native Stone Building
12.) 8 S. Main St. ~ Talbot Gang Shootout
13.) 13 E. Central Ave. ~ "Those Who Came Before"
14.) 23 E. Central Ave. ~ Prohibition Movement
15.) 202 E. Central Ave. ~ [this marker has been moved to 3 S. Main St. The saloon location is still east on Central.) ~ Last Chance Saloon
16.) 12 E Central Ave. ~ Last Land Rush
17.) 12 N. Main St. ~ Murder of Marshall George Flatt
18.) 16 N. Main St. ~ Red Light Saloon
19.) 1.5 mile south of town on US 81 ~ Ghost Riders [see gallery]
20.) 1 mile N/NW, on Avenue G & Country Rd., ~ Boot Hill Cemetery. [see photo galley]
I stayed in town and the walking tour took about 2 hours. I did not drive to the outlying sites, and do not know how long it would add. I show the photos as shown on the walking tour pamphlet.
There are many new markers not shown on the pamphlet, I will let you have the excitement of finding them yourself.
There is a guided tour of the cemetery...I will leave that to another category and another time
Caldwell was founded in 1871 stride the then new Chisholm Trail as an economic adventure of a group of Wichita entrepreneurs. The trail,running from Texas to the Intercontinental Railroad in northern Kansas, guided over a million longhorn steers and their guardian cowboys through Caldwell.
This vintage cowtown -- a place of cowboys, saloons, gambling, and violence -- boasted a longer cowtown period (1880-1885), a higher muder rate, and loss of more law enforcement officers than other more famous cowtowns. Being the first town north of Indian Territory, cowboys went wild in this untamed "Border Queen City" after months on the dusty and treacherous trail. Gunfights, showdowns, hangings and general hellraising were commonplace. From these true stories came the romanticized American cowboy and the love of the Wild West. in 1893, Caldwell was also a starting point for the famous Cherokee Strip Land Run, when Oklahoma Territory ws opened for homesteaders to stake land claims.
Caldwell's riotous past is acknowledged with a life-sized silhouette of a trail cattle drive, historical markers everywhere you tuen telling the cowtown stories, boot hill cemetery with "Talking Tombstone" re-enactors, and celebrations that bring history to life.