Oklahoma Panhandle: Badmen in No Man's Land
Until the last decade of the 19th Century, the long, narrow strip that would become known as the Oklahoma Panhandle had no government and plenty of men who didn't mind at all.
By Robert Barr Smith
"God's Land, But No Man's" -- that's what the New York Sun called it, and for once an Eastern newspaperman got something right about the West. The writer was describing an ancient, hard, unforgiving land, domain of the terrible Comanche time out of mind. In winter, murderous northers howled down out of Kansas and Colorado to freeze men and animals. For the rest of the year the winds were generally southerly, ranging all the way from gentle breezes to shrieking gales that drove great clouds of dust before them.
The Santa Fe Trail passed through part of it, winding down out of Kansas, bound southwest for old Santa Fe. After statehood in 1907, the region began to be called the Oklahoma Panhandle. Today, it comprises the three busy agricultural counties of Cimarron, Beaver and Texas, but during the 1850s, '60s, '70s and '80s, it had no government at all.
It formed a long, narrow rectangle, altogether about 5,700 square miles. Once this emptiness had been Spanish, split up into three massive land grants, and then it had been, in name at least, part of the Mexican province of Texas (Tejas). When the United States annexed Texas, prior to statehood, this northern strip was cut off to comply with the Slave State--Free State balance mandated by the Missouri Compromise.
The 37th parallel had been established as the southern boundary of Kansas and Colorado, but the northern frontier of Texas officially stopped at 36 degrees 30 seconds latitude. In between the two borders lay about 34 miles of space unassigned to anybody at all. To the east, the western line of the Cherokee Outlet was drawn at the 100th meridian, leaving a gap of just under 170 miles before you reached the New Mexico Territory line. In time, Congress officially referred to the area as the "Public Land Strip." Out West, though, men seldom called it anything but No Man's Land.
The first Anglo occupiers were mostly cattlemen, tough, adventurous types willing to fight anybody for free grass and water. After the Civil War, they could push their herds northward into Kansas for shipment, and more cattle were driven north out of Texas, up the Jones-Plummer Trail from Tascosa and Mobeetie way. Where the trail crossed Beaver Creek (also called Beaver River), a man named Lane opened a "road ranch" -- a sort of store-saloon-campground -- to service the great drives north. But the cattlemen soon had rivals for this big, empty country. After passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, No Man's Land was surveyed and laid off into townships: The boundaries were marked with little domes of zinc, called "pot lines." Kansas newspapers published rhapsodic stories of new towns and free land; the embryonic town of Beaver City (which would become just Beaver) would be called the "new metropolis of the plains." Most of this stuff was pure moonshine, but it sounded good.
Settlement followed, land-hungry families looking for their own little place in the sun. Most of those places were not much to start with, either. Most folks lived in sod houses, for wood was hard to find on those wind-swept plains. The typical "soddie" had turf walls about 2 feet thick, with a sod roof laid across timber rafters and a mat of green branches. There was a door, of course, or maybe two, and perhaps even a couple of inside walls to create separate rooms. There might or might not be windows, and if there were, their closures were likely to be wooden shutters, since glass was scarce and expensive. All around these isolated soddies lay the empty prairie. One settler built a tower, from which his wife could hang a lantern to guide him home across the emptiness.
At first there was much hard feeling between cattlemen and settlers. The range, once clear and open, was no longer so, and there was a good deal of fence-cutting and crops eaten and trampled by stock. On the other hand, many "nesters" were not above supplementing their meager diet with beef, which often belonged to somebody else. Sometimes it came to shooting -- nesters shooting intruding cows, cowboys shooting back, nesters returning the fire, and so on. In time, many ranchers would kill a beef on Saturday and share it with their nearest granger neighbors. A little at a time, most men found a way to live together.
Any collection of more than two buildings qualified as a town in No Man's Land. "Most towns," according to one account, "were made up of three or four sod houses grouped around a larger sod structure housing a country stock of merchandise. [Only Beaver City] reached the dignity of a village...no more than six hundred ... . Beaver was the only town in the Territory big enough to take sides in a controversy."
Beaver was also a major collection point for much of the riffraff of the area. The same reporter, who had a certain gift for description, described the little town's "floating" population: "Floating is scarcely the word to describe the population temporarily there ... . If they floated it was on a sea of alcohol. If they sailed or flew the breeze that wafted them on was heavy with the fumes of tobacco and the smoke of gunpowder. If they drifted they were stranded at the shortest of intervals on bars not built of sand."
Most of the other hamlets were little more than wide spots in the road. Gate City, for example, boasted two stores, a blacksmith shop and a post office. Neutral City was about the same size, except for a bumper crop of saloons, and so was Hardesty. Many "cities," such as Optima, Grand Valley and Paladora, consisted of a post office and not much else. Carrizo was three saloons and a lunch counter. In the 1860s, William "Bud" Coe's gang of thieves was surprised there, taken while sleeping in an abandoned adobe. Eleven of them were supposedly hanged from the big cottonwoods along the riverbank behind Carrizo. Coe himself got away or wasn't there; he got his cottonwood limb later, outside Pueblo, Colo., in 1868. Perhaps it was best that Carrizo's first postmaster, George W. Hubbard, changed the town's name in 1890 to Florence, in honor of his daughter. A nephew of P.T. Barnum, Fairchild B. Drew, then became postmaster, moved the post office to the east a bit and changed the name to Kenton.
Probably the worst of No Man's Land's towns was a woebegone settlement called "Old Sod Town," a refuse-littered dump of about a dozen sod buildings. It's gone now -- today, only the wind remains. But in its heyday it was a center for the moonshine trade and exported -- illegally -- a considerable amount of firewater across the line into the area of Indian Territory known as the Cherokee Outlet, or Cherokee Strip. Old Sod Town was also the center of operations for an outfit of horse thieves called the Chitwood Gang, who stole anything with four legs until a citizen blew a hole in one of the gang members and vigilantes ran the others out of the area.
Anything that passed for a settlement generally had at least one saloon. If it didn't, you could get a drink at the store. The only exception, according to an old-time cowboy, was a one-horse place commonly called Slapout, so named because the storekeeper there was forever saying, "I'm sorry, but we're slap out of that." On these rude oases the cowboys descended on payday, itching for excitement and sport. That sport generally took the form of filling up on tarantula juice and shooting up the town, not necessarily in that order.
Some forms of relaxation were more civilized. Dances were held as often as anybody could find a reason, and people came from as far as 50 miles to attend. They were orderly affairs, mostly, in part because the only person allowed to carry a gun was the cloakroom attendant, whose job it was to collect everybody else's hardware at the door. And, there being always more men than women, each man was issued a number as he came in the door. For each dance, the male dancers' numbers were called off in strict rotation. That way, nobody got to dance more often than anybody else, removing another ground for potential trouble.
For all the growing pains, by the end of 1885 settlement was well-advanced, especially along the creeks flowing into Beaver Creek. Many of the settlers lived from hand to mouth and earned what ready cash they had by collecting buffalo bones from the thousands of carcasses left over from the great hunts. When the first settlers reached No Man's Land, buffalo skeletons lay as thickly as 50 to a 100 within a few hundred yards. Mingled with them were acres of beef bones, a legacy from the terrible blizzard of 1886, which decimated the great cattle herds scattered across No Man's Land. A ton of bones brought $8 to $10 in Dodge City, Kan., and horns brought even more money, since they were a favorite material for knife handles. Many a poor nester bought crucial groceries by harvesting bones and driving the long haul to Dodge.
Along with the hard-working nesters and cattlemen, large and small, came the grifters, the bullies and the thieves. In the northeast corner of No Man's Land a couple of counterfeiters turned out bags of phony coins, most of which they circulated up in Kansas. If the law got too close north of the border, it was easy enough to find sanctuary down in No Man's Land, where the writ of Kansas law did not run.
Because No Man's Land belonged to no governmental entity, there could be no law enforcement save what the people managed for themselves. In 1885 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the area was not part of the Cherokee Outlet to the east, as many had thought. The secretary of the interior opined only that the area was public domain, and therefore open to anybody to settle. And so the citizens handled their own law enforcement, either personally or by forming vigilante groups. In Beaver City, for example, when a drunk started to shoot up the town, endangering the families there, the citizens simply filled the offender full of holes and buried him without ceremony. There was no formal inquest, both because there was no formal authority to hold one and because nobody cared. The ancient Western defense of "he had it coming" ran strong in this pioneer country.
Others were summarily dealt with by people they tried to bully, to the satisfaction of the general citizenry. One such fellow was Bill Williams, the "Bad Man of Gate City" (every little village had one). Williams had won a measure of dubious fame when he emerged from his shack, drunk, forgetting he had tied his half-broken horse to the building. As he tried to gallop off into the sunset, his horse remained attached to the shack and went berserk. The shack disintegrated, and Bill ended up south end first in a prickly-pear cactus. This disaster called for urgent surgery of the roughest frontier kind. Williams was stretched face down on the saloon bar, while the spines of the prickly pear were extracted from his posterior. He swore horribly as the citizens pulled slowly, pretending not to want to hurt him.
For a while, a big-time criminal or two operated in No Man's Land. Thomas "Black Jack" Ketchum, the story goes, three times held up the railroad over in New Mexico Territory, then fled with his cohorts to the safety of Tug Toland's ranch in No Man's Land. Twice he and his men escaped unscathed, but the third holdup, on August 16, 1899, was a mistake. For this time the stalwart conductor, Frank E. Harrington, badly maimed Black Jack's arm with a load of buckshot. As the engineer put it: "You said you were tired of having your train robbed. Now I believe you."
Ketchum, tried in New Mexico Territory, departed this earth in memorable fashion. Facing the gallows, he called out: "I'll be in hell before you start breakfast, boys! Let her rip!" And they did, for somebody had miscalculated weights and measures, and the drop tore off the outlaw's head. No Man's Land would know him no more.
Liberal, just across the Kansas line, was an especially thirsty town. The Rock Island railhead reached Liberal in the spring of 1888, a stockyard appeared, and the cattlemen and cowboys followed. These men were given to celebrating in style, and to accommodate their taste for booze and other more intimate indoor sports, a little town popped up just over the border in No Man's Land. It called itself Beer City.
Beer City actually bore the more respectable name of White City at first, since it was roofed mostly in canvas, but Beer City was obviously a more appropriate title, and the name stuck. There was nothing much in Beer City but saloons and dance halls. It never had a church or a school or even a post office. During the cattle-shipping season, itinerant prostitutes traveled to Beer City from Dodge City and Wichita. Many of the girls who staffed Beer City's houses commuted from Liberal, traveling between the two towns in the daily horse-drawn hack.
Predictably known as the "Sodom and Gomorrah of the Plains," Beer City knew no holidays, for its business was constant merriment. The entrepreneurs who ran the Elephant, the Yellow Snake and the other saloons advertised their town as the only place "in the civilized world where there is absolutely no law." They staged dances, horse races, boxing and wrestling matches, and Wild West shows to keep their customers amused between drinks. Some of them even furnished "drunk pens," wire enclosures in which a sodden cowboy could sleep it off without getting rolled for any money he had left.
In addition to the little stills, producing more or less poisonous rotgut, there were several serious distilleries. One was run out of a cave covered by a lean-to soddy on Hog Creek, near Gate City, and operated night and day. Another, down on Clearwater Creek south of Beaver, produced a couple of barrels of "good whiskey" each week. The best-known still was run by the man who would appear in 1888 as the first attorney general of an illusory Cimarron Territory. This still even boasted an expert distiller, imported from Kentucky, where folks were supposed to know about these things. Another artist boiled dried peaches and added the juice to his moonshine, producing what was described as "a beautiful, amber-colored and fancy-flavored drink."
In time, enthusiastic residents of No Man's Land formed a provisional government, as they called it. They had a great seal made and used it to fire off petitions to Washington, D.C., for territorial status. They grandly called their new land Cimarron Territory, in fact, in the forlorn hope that the name and their activity would move the Congress to favorably consider their ambitions. They sent a couple of competing representatives to Washington, too, and even found some allies in Congress, but the area would remain an orphan until the Oklahoma Organic Act of 1890 made it part of brand-new Oklahoma Territory.
That great day came too late for many residents of No Man's Land, for the living was lonely and farming was a hardscrabble life. Wheat prices were not high enough to make much money, and the nearest railheads were still up in Kansas. There was a severe drought in 1888, and as a last straw the supply of beef and buffalo bones was nearly exhausted, and so too were buffalo and cow chips, the staple fuel. A mournful nester jingle went:
Pickin' up bones to keep from starving, Pickin' up chips to keep from freezing, Pickin' up courage to keep from leaving, Way out West in No Man's Land.
With most of the bones and chips gone, the courage of many citizens ran out. One family recalled planting 50 acres of corn and harvesting only enough roasting ears for a single meal. For a lot of hard-working settlers, the time had come to seek greener pastures. Some of the criminals drifted away, too; few people had any money, so crime didn't pay at all well. Even the provisional government folded up. And so, when the Oklahoma lands to the east opened for settlement in 1889, many people pulled up stakes and joined the land rush. The population dropped from about 12,000 to under 3,000, and, as an old-timer put it, "We had to count in some prairie dogs and jack rabbits to get that number."
Things began to look brighter once No Man's Land became part of Oklahoma Territory. More people began to move in, and the strip got some real law. In addition to locally elected lawmen, the hard cases now had to contend with federal judges and tough deputy marshals. One of these marshals was the formidable Dane, Chris Madsen.
Today, Beaver, Teaxas, and Cimarron counties of the Oklahoma Panhandle is home to ethnic groups. There present population of the “no mans land” stays around 30 to 33,000 people with Texas County having the largest population of around 23,000. The Hispanic population has grown to around 25% with a sparse population of African Americans and Asians. The many ethnic groups make a valuable contribution to the economy and culture.
The main income stems from agriculture and petroleum industry. No Man’s Land has perfect weather for raising cattle and the ogalallah aquifer gives the abundant under ground water needed to raise animals and families. The petroleum industry is comprised of both oil and gas with many pipelines crossing the land.
The people of the panhandle are very independent and conservative. Most of the residents consider themselves to be Christians. They consider this area to be the best place to raise a family and live their lives. Remember, when in noman’s land, stop in and see us.
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