Dr. O.H. Simpson, pioneer dentist, creates historic landmark

     The story of how Boot Hill got started goes back to the early days of our rowdy little town on the Western frontier.
     Some accounts say the first burial on the hill happened when a man was shot there and left to die. Supposedly, the wives of two local men heard the story and sneaked to the site under the cover of darkness to give the man the best burial they could.
     No one knows just how many people were buried on Boot Hill: some sources say as few as 15, a mid-century postcard claims there were 43 and an obituary in the Dodge City Daily Globe in 1935 says there were 90.
     At any rate, the practice of burying indigent and poor strangers on the hill rather unceremoniously only lasted from the town's founding in 1872 until 1879, when the bodies people knew about and the ones they could find were moved to the town's official cemetery.
     A school was built on the hill, and the mayor proclaimed that the name Boot Hill was forever dead.
     Townspeople, however, immediately began to call the school the "Boot Hill School," and a local dentist further cemented the name into the town's history in 1930.

Place in history
     Dr. O.H. Simpson, who had come to Dodge City in 1885, was semiretired at the time and was a member of the local Rotary club. The club was preparing to host the state convention in Dodge City, and Simpson had an idea which would attract Rotarians to the convention.
     Always interested in the history of Dodge City, Simpson decided to put his new hobby to use. Simpson had begun making sculptures out of cement, using modeling skills he developed as a dentist.
     Simpson was, in fact, responsible for the earliest experiments in using gold to cast inlays for damaged teeth. He demonstrated his techniques at a national convention of dentists in Wheeling, W.Va., in 1903.
     With a little spare time on his hands, Simpson began to tinker with sculpture. His first projects were an elk head for the Elks club hall, followed by concrete frogs with colored marbles for eyes. He gave the frogs to friends all over the country.
     When the city was preparing to dedicate a new City Hall on Boot Hill, Simpson came up with a plan to create a statue of a cowboy to sit in front of the impressive new structure.
     He asked Joe Sughrue, a young Dodge City citizen who later became chief of police, to pose for him.
     Sughrue was dressed from head to toe in archetypical cowboy gear and Simpson covered him with plaster of Paris, capturing every fold of his outfit.
     The process included making a life mask of young Sughrue. The mask-making process involved sticking straws up the models nose and covering his face in plaster of Paris. According to some accounts, Simpson accidently pinched the straw and they nearly lost the man before the plaster dried.
     Once the plaster was hard, it was removed from the model and Simpson used the resulting molds to cast the figure in concrete.
     Simpson worked on the statue for months and the finished cowboy was unveiled on Nov. 4, 1929 at the City Hall dedication.
     The base of the sculpture carries the following inscription, a message from the cowboy it depicts: "Upon the ashes of my camp fire this city is built."

Populating the Hill
     After the dedication, and pondering the upcoming Rotary convention, Simpson decided to recreate the old Boot Hill cemetery. On the site of the informal burials in the early days, Simpson created the faces of cowboys and boots of cowboys and arranged them to look like the remnants of those poor lost souls. He made makeshift grave markers with some actual names and some fictional ones. And he even put up a tree with a rope to demonstrate the penalty for horse stealing in the early days.
     The "cement cemetery," as Simpson called it, was so popular that it remained in place long after the Rotarians left town and thousands of tourists were told that the faces were the petrified remains of the actual corpses.
     Simpson later created a pair of steer heads in yokes to stand on the hill in honor of the caravans of pioneers who drove wagons along the Santa Fe Trail.
     An undated article in the Topeka State Journal, found in the files at the Kansas Heritage Center, quotes Dr. Simpson: "Towns seem to be like individuals and have a distinct personality. Some are staid or stoic, some are temperamental and others attract to themselves dramatic episodes. This western crossroads was unquestionably the most typically western in habits and customs of any town that ever existed. The people were never passive, but always sports, ready to laugh, and willing to be laughed at.
     "Dodge City produced more national characters and notorious gunmen than all the rest of the wild towns of the turbulent west combined, and was longer passing through the gun age. Since the automobile has so thoroughly shuffled this human deck and obliterated all frontiers, there can never be another town like it."
     Over the years, Dr. Simpson's cowboy has stood on Boot Hill through heat and cold, drought and deluge. Not the best material for permanence to begin with, the concrete was deteriorating. Repair and preservation efforts in past decades appear to be irreversible. Local preservation officials are interested in  moving the statue to an indoor location but none has yet been found.