'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.

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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.

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