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A Trip To Dodge City Research Paper

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Day 2 - Sunday June 5 - Sweet Spring, MO, to Dodge City, KS 418 miles

A lot of driving again, through even flatter and boring Kansas farmland occasionally dotted with huge grain elevators. Once you’ve seen one wheat field ... Much of our travel was on U.S. 50, a historic road that stretches from Ocean City, MD, to West Sacramento, CA.

We had a couple interesting stops. The first was in the Flint Hills of Kansas, so named because the limestone is just below the surface and the rock is imbedded with pockets of flint, which were of use to the Indians. This land was no good for farming because of the lack of deep topsoil, so it was bypassed and thus never plowed or developed and is now the largest remaining tall grass prairie in the nation. Prairie is a French word for meadow and when the white settlers moved west, they encountered tall grass prairies from Texas to Canada and from Colorado to the Mississippi River. The mature grass was about 6 feet tall. In the winter it dried up and fell over, making a thick dry thatch (which served as a winter home for critters) that usually caught fire during the spring storms. The fire would rage across the prairie until it came to a river too wide to cross and then …show more content…

They mine 200 tons of salt per 40 feet of wall. The company earns $30 a ton. Considering that we pay about $2 for a 1-pound bag, the middlemen must get most of the profits. The guide explained that coal mining and salt mining are very similar and use the same equipment, but salt mines are much safer. Roof collapses are rare, and a potential collapse can be detected beforehand because salt is elastic, not brittle like coal. Miners don’t have to wear masks, even though fine salt floats in the air during drilling and blasting, because the body will naturally get rid of excess salt. And there’s no methane to

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