This column comes to you from the Old West, near Hays City, Kansas -- we passed through Hays coming and going, but most of our time was spent about 70-some miles north along the Kansas-Nebraska line.
Hays, once called Hays 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 blockhouse made of cut native limestone in which to take shelter and from which to 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 renamed 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.
Some of these soldiers were involved in a battle which could have turned out like Little Bighorn. In the summer of 1867, they had followed a small band of Native Americans who had killed a group of railroad workers near Hays north to Prairie Dog Creek on the Kansas-Nebraska line (not far from where I used to live) and there found themselves far outnumbered and under attack by about 800 warriors led by Chief Satanta of the Kiowa, and Roman Nose, a war chief of the Cheyenne. The cavalry soldiers retreated toward Ft. Hays in a box formation, taking shelter in gullies and washes for three or more days, before finally breaking free and returning to the fort.
I could tell you more details of such battles during the years of the Indian Wars, but I will move on to other histories 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 Native Americans.
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; and the 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 in the area.
Of course, just a few years ago, Mrs. Griz was born in Hays, but I haven't found any criminal activity attributed to her name here in the old papers.
Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at rmoll@nwadg .com. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 08/01/2018