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.’

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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.

Some ‘towns,’ announced with considerable fanfare, were chimeras, nothing more than a land speculator’s illusion. Such a place was Nevada, down on Duck Pond Creek, which turned out to be only a lot of fine words and a set of stakes laying out the town. A minister, reaching Nevada in 1886, found ‘not a living creature’ there.

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.

Considering the uneven quality of some of the whiskey, peculiar results were not at all unusual. One ranch foreman, for example, became so spiflicated that his loyal crew tucked him away in a storeroom above the saloon to sleep it off. He appeared next morning a changed man, for he had awakened to find himself in a room full of coffins and was convinced that he had died and been resurrected.

Sometimes the merriment got a little grimmer, like the night long-haired Dick Davis arrived in Beaver from Tascosa, Texas, with a couple of dance hall queens. Davis took his stand at the bar to regale everybody with tales of his own magnificence. His bombast wore very thin very quickly. Somebody shouted, ‘Shoot the jaw!’ or something that sounded like that, and somebody did. A .45 slug broke Davis’ jawbones into dozens of pieces and blew out all his teeth but one. Mumbling ‘God, I’m shot!’ — a massive understatement — Dick Davis collapsed. A local doctor picked out all the fragments he could find — about 70 of them — and Davis survived to carry on a distinguished career as a claim jumper and horse thief.

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