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The O:JA&L Masters Series
Flash Fiction
Featured Writer: Michael Martone
FORT DODGE (Kansas)
From The Tiny Book of Forts by Michael Martone. Click on the title to explore more of his work in the new PDF chapbook available now as a free offering from O:JA&L’s Buttonhook Press.
The walls of Fort Dodge were built with buffalo bones. Once the railroad arrived the lumber did too. The sod houses and hide tents gave way to imported wood. The dugouts and the adobe were replaced. And then the army left, left the wooden barracks, the officers’ quarters, the empty quartermaster’s stores. Kansas took it over eventually, began to ship the state’s veterans there, turning it into an old soldiers’ home. Today, 97 people are left to occupy what was left behind. The stone foundations, the empty rooms, the wooden windows and doorframes, the century old glass, the generally good bones of the things that have mostly disappeared.
About the writer: Michael Martone is an American author. A prolific writer, he has published 30 books and chapbooks. From 1996 to 2020, he was a professor at the University of Alabama where he taught in the Program in Creative Writing. Martone is now retired.
Image: Sutler’s store at Fort Dodge, Kansas by Theodore R. Davis (1840-1894). Wood engraving. Illustration for Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1867. p. 329. Public domain.
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