It's name is synonymous with the Wild West of yesteryear; the town where such gunslingers as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday shot first and asked questions later; where ambitious frontiersmen massed in salon bars to make a name for themselves, spawning a romanticised view of the American prairies.
 
But anyone travelling to deepest Kansas today will find a very different Dodge City.Today the town of 25,000 is so full of Mexican restaurants and flags that it has earned a nickname of Little Mexico.
 
And, as the area attracts more and more poor migrant workers, Dodge City has become emblematic of another US battleground - the war over immigration. The reason has been the transformation of America's meat-packing industry.
 
During the past few decades, many of the nation's giant meat producers and processors have moved their plants from the cities to rural areas where they are closer to the massive herds of cattle that wander the US plains and to non-union labourers.
 
For Dodge City - famed as the "Queen of the Cowtowns" during its cowboy heyday - the advent of the slaughter plants seemed a natural fit. Locals have long recognised that the odor of manure here is the smell of money.
 
"They are a major hub of business and economic activity and a huge employer," said Ted Schroeder, agricultural economist at Kansas State University. "You can't go into those communities without sensing the presence and importance of those large economic facilities. Everything around there is either working with, complementing or part of that industry."
 
So while many rural towns slowly die, Dodge City and others have become engines of growth, but the wealth has brought problems.
 
The mainly Hispanic workers who have poured into these communities are stretching schools and law enforcement. Police officers cite problems with narcotics flooding over the border from Mexico and the gangs who control the trade, but school teachers report the biggest concerns.
 
Dodge City school officials count 23 languages spoken by immigrant families, though the town is overwhelmingly Latino.
 
About 44 percent of students in Dodge City have limited English proficiency, prompting the district to establish a [newcomer programme] for immigrant students geared heavily toward language acquisition, and includes help from Spanish-speaking assistants.
 
Just a decade ago, about 70 percent of Dodge City students were English-speaking whites. Today, that statistic has been turned on its head - about 70 percent of the 5,800 students who attend Dodge City school are Hispanic, with non-Hispanic whites now comprising just 25 percent.
 
And still they come, attracted by wages that, if hardly extravagant, are higher than immigrants could ever hope to earn at home. Dodge City's per capita income of $15,538 in 2000 may be an improvement, but it still remains far below the $21,587 national average. Meanwhile, many locals are beginning to feel like foreigners in their own homes. Randy Ford and his wife, Betty, have lived in Dodge City for 35 years but no longer attend the city's Independence Day events, claiming they can no longer understand what the singers belting out Latin numbers are saying. "We don't go anymore because we don't want to be Mexican," he said. "We want to be American."
 
The politics of immigration are a hot potato in the US, particularly after President Bush's preferred bill failed to pass Congress and candidates for the election of 2008 have gone out of their way to court such towns on a staunchly anti-immigration ticket.
 
All of which means that hundreds of years later, Dodge City remains the battle ground it ever was - only the factions have changed.