Volume 10 , Issue 34

No Mans land of Oklahoma

Have you ever realized that five flags have flown over No Man's Land in Northwest Oklahoma?

According to Timothy Egan's book, The Worst Hard Time, Spain was the first to claim it, but two expeditions and reports from traders reinforced the view that the land was best left to the "humped-back cows" and their pursuers, the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache.

Spain gave the territory to Napoleon. The French flag flew for all of twenty days, until the emperor turned around and sold it to the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A subsequent survey put the land in Mexico's hands, and extension of their rule over Texas in 1819.

Seventeen years later, the newly independent republic of Texas claimed all territory north to Colorado. But when Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, it was on the condition that no new slave territory would rise above the 36.5 degrees in latitude, the old Missouri compromise line.

That left an orphaned rectangle, 35 miles wide and 210 miles long, that was not attached to any territory or state in the West. It got its name, No Man's Land.

The eastern boundary, at the 100th meridian, was where the plains turned unliveably arid, unfit for Jefferson's farmer-townbuilders.

It was in the late nineteenth century, that one corner of the panhandle served as a roost for outlaws, thieves, and killers.

The Coe Gang was known for dressing like Indians while attacking wagon trains on the Cimarron Cutoff.

The Santa Fe Railroad pushed a line as far as Liberal, Kansas, on the Panhandle border, in 1888. Kansas was dry ... and so a place called Beer City sprang up just across the stateline ... a hive of bars, brothels, gambling houses, smuggling dens, and town developers on the run. The first settlement in No Man's Land was Beer City and lasted barely two years before it was carted away in pieces.

Law, taxes, and land title companies finally came to the Panhandle in 1890, when the long, undesired stretch was stitched to Oklahoma Territory.

No Man's Land was settled, when there was no other land left to take. It was a hard place to love and a tableau for mischief and sudden death from the sky or up from the ground.
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