Why do we say 'get out of Dodge'?

To_ get out of Dodge is to leave a place quickly, especially in the face of trouble or danger. The expression typically implies some urgency, as the speaker is not suggesting a leisurely departure. One does not _get out of Dodge when all is well; one gets out of Dodge when things are going poorly, and when remaining promises to make them worse.

The Dodge in question is Dodge City, Kansas, a cattle town that had established itself by the 1870s as something close to the platonic ideal of the Wild West settlement: populated by gunslingers and cowboys of uncertain moral character, and possessed of the sort of reputation that made it a reliable shorthand for lawlessness. That much is historically grounded. What is rather less grounded is that anyone in Dodge City was actually saying get out of Dodge at the time.

No one is entirely certain who first combined these words, or under what circumstances. What the evidence does suggest is that the phrase, whatever its earlier oral history, entered written American English in the 1950s, a few years after the debut of the popular show Gunsmoke.

Gunsmoke aired in various forms from 1952 to 1975, first as a radio drama and then as a television series. It was set in Dodge City during the 1890s, and starred James Arness as U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, whose professional duties involved the repeated encouragement of outlaws and troublemakers to remove themselves from his jurisdiction. The catchphrase that emerged from this fictional context was get out of Dodge, and it proved durable enough to migrate from the show into general use. Our earliest citation for the phrase comes in 1956.

I got yuh covered, pardner - “Thought I told you to_ get out o’ Dodge,” threatened Scotty Telton to Buck Hardy, in best John Wayne fashion …
—The Miami News_, 13 August. 1956

There remains a question that may be unanswerable: did the peace officers of the actual Dodge City, in the actual 1890s, ever issue their ultimatums in quite those words? It seems possible, although somewhat unlikely; although words and expressions often exist in spoken form for some time before they are found in print it is a stretch that get out of Dodge was being said for well over 50 years before anyone thought to write it down. So as with so many colloquial expressions, we will likely never recover the first utterance, if there was one.