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is a city and the county seat of Ellis County, Kansas, near the intersection of Interstate 70 and U.S. Highway 183. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 20,013.
Hays is home to Fort Hays State University and the Hays Larks, champions of the Jayhawk Collegiate League for most of the 21st century.
The city of Hays was incorporated in 1867, close to the site of Fort Hays. In the early days, Hays was a wild and lawless town, filled with saloons and dance halls. The legendary Wild Bill Hickok served as sheriff for a few months in 1869, but left town the next year after a brawl with some troopers from Fort Hays. Summing up her impression while her husband, George Custer, was encamped near Fort Hays, Elizabeth Custer said, "there was enough desperate history in that little town in one summer to make a whole library of dime novels." Between August of 1867 and December of 1873 there were over 30 homicides in and around Hays. Hays developed the reputation, which was well deserved, as one of the most violent towns on the Kansas Frontier. The original Boot Hill was located in Hays, not Dodge City as many people believe. In fact, when Dodge City was founded in 1872, the Hays City Boot Hill was well populated. Mrs. Custer noted in her diary in the summer of 1869 there were already 36 graves in the cemetery called "Boot Hill". The Hays Boot Hill is actually the oldest west of the Mississippi.
By the mid 1870's the "end of the tracks" moved on and with it went the teamsters, railroad workers, soldiers and famous characters of the day. Hays City gradually quieted down and began serving as a point of arrival for immigrants, most notably a group of ethnic Germans from the Volga region of Russia. These immigrants were descendants of Germans who had traveled to Russia in response to a manifesto of Catherine II the Great. She promised the immigrants freedom of religion, tax exemption, freedom from military duties, and free land. Eventually, later Czars began to break these promises. Dissatisfied by the new policies, the Volga Germans sent a scouting party to the United States. In central Kansas, they found land suitable for farming similar to their lifestyle in Russia. The first Volga-German settlers arrived in Hays in February of 1876. Several communities were eventually formed in the Hays area, retaining many of the differences in dialect, food and family that each community had previously formed in Russia.