Fort Hays State Historic Site

The army established Fort Hays in 1865 and moved it to its present site in 1867, positioning it to protect the Kansas Pacific Railroad and the stage and wagon roads that carried people and freight across the plains. As the rails advanced, the fort became a supply base and a staging point for troops operating across the central plains, and a town grew up alongside it that eventually became the city of Hays.

The post drew a parade of names now woven into frontier legend. George Armstrong Custer was stationed here, and figures such as Wild Bill Hickok and the scout and showman Buffalo Bill Cody passed through the fort and the rough young railroad town beside it. For a time Hays City had a reputation as one of the wildest end-of-track towns on the frontier.

The fort existed because of the collision between the expanding railroad and the Native peoples whose homeland the plains had long been. The Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Kiowa and Comanche, and other Plains nations hunted and lived across this country, following the bison herds, and the coming of the rails, the soldiers, and the settlers broke apart that way of life. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and the other Plains nations continue today, most now centered in Oklahoma.

The history that the fort represents is a hard one, the story of a homeland taken and a people forced off it. The site does not shy from that context, and understanding it is part of understanding why a stone army post came to stand on this stretch of prairie at all.

The buildings that remain are built of the pale local limestone that gives so much of western Kansas its character, a soft stone that hardens after it is quarried. The blockhouse, an unusual hexagonal structure, served as a defensive strongpoint and headquarters, and the guardhouse held the post's prisoners. Their thick walls have outlasted the wooden barracks and stables that once surrounded them.

The small museum uses these buildings and the open grounds to tell the daily story of the soldiers who served here, their drills and duties, their boredom and hardship, and the rough frontier world just beyond the parade ground. Interpretive markers across the site show where the vanished buildings once stood, so the whole layout of the post comes back into view.

Fort Hays sits in the Smoky Hills, a region of low hills, mixed-grass prairie, and buff-colored stone that lies between the tallgrass country to the east and the high plains to the west. The Smoky Hill River winds through nearby, lined with cottonwoods, and the surrounding grasslands hold meadowlarks, hawks, and the deer and pheasant common across the region.

Spring and fall are the most comfortable seasons for walking the grounds, with mild air and green or golden grass. Summer on this prairie is hot and bright, with little shade, and the wind is nearly constant. Winter can be cold and stark, the stone walls standing gray against a bleached and open landscape.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.