Dobytown

Kearney City on paper, Dobytown to everyone, adobe all through

Its official name was Kearney City. Nobody used it. The buildings were adobe, so the trail called it Dobytown, and that is the name that stuck to a place three miles west of Fort Kearny that existed for one purpose: to sell the garrison and the passing wagon trains everything the fort would not.

It went up in 1859, and for about a decade it was the major outfitting point west of the Missouri. Emigrants on the Oregon and California trails, freighters, teamsters, soldiers walking out from the post. A Pony Express station operated here. It was the first county seat of Kearney County. And its actual trade was gambling, liquor and prostitution, and the fort tolerated it at arm's length rather than absorbing it.

The one detail that survives best is a complaint. General William Tecumseh Sherman came through and described the whiskey he was handed in a single word: tanglefoot. It is a period term for liquor that takes your legs out from under you, and it says as much about the place as a paragraph would.

Dobytown died the way most trail towns died, which is to say the railroad killed it and the army finished it. The Union Pacific was completed in 1869 and the overland traffic that had fed the town moved onto rails. On 22 May 1871 the army ordered Fort Kearny abandoned. With no fort and no wagons, there was no reason for the town, and the adobe went back to being dirt. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

There is nothing standing. What is here is a marker and a piece of ground that carried an extraordinary volume of American traffic for ten years and then stopped, completely, inside of two. If you are working the Platte Valley, Fort Kearny State Historical Park is the anchor for the day and this is the footnote three miles west that explains what the soldiers did on their evenings off.