WESTSIDE — This column comes to you from Hays City, Kansas - now just called Hays. I write from Hays - before spending time another 70 miles north - because of a loved one who was hospitalized here and who passed from this life on Sunday morning.

Hays, the Old West city, was the site of historic Fort Hays. The old fort - not a wooden stockade as often portrayed in old Westerns, but a number of buildings to quarter soldiers with a block house made of cut native limestone in which to take shelter and from whichto withstand attacks from warring bands of Native Americans - was located here first to protect stage and freight wagons of the Butterfield Overland Dispatch traveling the Smoky Hill Trail to Denver and, soon after, railroad workers building rail lines to the west.

The fort, originally called Ft. Fletcher after the governor of Missouri, was named after Civil War general Alexander Hays, who had been killed in 1864 at the Battle of the Wilderness. The fort served as the garrison for the 5th Infantry, the 7th and the 10th Calvary. The soldiers of the 10th Calvary are better known as the Buffalo Soldiers. I could tell you of some of their battles during the years of the Indian Wars, but I will move on to other history here.

Hays City and Ft. Hays were for a time home to such notable characters as Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock. Most know, at least in part, the story of Custer. Hickock was sheriff here for a short time and reportedly killed two men in gunfights during his first month in office.

A later sheriff of the county in which Hays is the county seat was killed in the county north, where I served for a time as a deputy sheriff. In June of 1875, Alexander Ramsey, described in the newspaper as an honest and good sheriff, followed the tracks of stolen ponies north. When he confronted the thieves on the street in Stockton, a gun battle ensued and Ramsey and one of the thieves fell mortally wounded. Surprisingly, a wounded horse thief who got away was later arrested and tried but acquitted because the string of ponies was stolen, not from white settlers, but from Indians.

Anyway, the newspaper accounts of Hays gunfights, lynchings and other crimes won’t all fit here. Let it suffice to say that Hays City was a rough Old West town in the 1800s. The original Boot Hill Cemetery was not in Dodge City, but here.

One newspaper account described the town in this way: “Hays City, Kansas, is not a pleasant place to live in, or to die in. People die there more readily than they can live there; andthe graves with which the cemetery is abundantly studded are of what may be called abnormal origin. The revolver is a more prolific source of obituaries than any other disease, and bowel complaint is far less fatal than the Bowie-knife. For years past Hays City has been the abode of the most desperate characters in the Union, and consequently the scene of the most terrible tragedies which ever made even the inhabitants of that dark and bloody border country ashamed of the reputation and of their class and locality.”

Those days are long past and Hays is a pretty nice town now, a college town and the leading city of the whole northwest corner of the state. There’s a Walmart here, plenty of restaurants and hotels and an excellent hospital. I haven’t heard of a single shooting or saloon hall brawl since we’ve been here. Of course, Mrs. Griz was born in Hays a few years ago, but I haven’t found any criminal activity attributed to her name here in the old papers.

Though a nice town compared to its Old West days, our stay here has been difficult. We came so Mrs. Griz could be with her sister as the ravages of cancer took their toll and ended her sister’s brief stay in this world. But even in that there was blessing - time with family and the comfort of knowing that a soul who trusted in the mercy of the Lord Jesus was taken to her eternal rest.

Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by e-mail at rmoll@nwaonline .com.

Opinion, Pages 8 on 02/23/2011