The law didn't care about Dick Davis getting shot, of course, because there wasn't any law. Criminals simply went unpunished, unless an irate citizenry could organize in time to deal with them. One agonized parent, petitioning the U.S. Department of Justice, bitterly alleged, 'My boy was killed in June, 1886, at Neutral City,' and then went on to list seven more men killed and three badly wounded between that time and February 1887.

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Neutral City was the scene of one young teamster's startling introduction to No Man's Land. Stopped in front of Bly's general store after his long trip, the young man's oxen promptly lay down, and the youngster himself was half asleep. Abruptly, Bly emerged from his emporium brandishing two shotguns and shouting: 'Drive that team up a little! Drive that team up!' And before the teamster could get his tired team on its feet and out of the way, Bly, safely barricaded behind slabs of dry-salted meat, began blazing away at some target across the street.

The storekeeper's target was a cowboy called Boone, who was preparing to open a saloon on the other side of the street, an undertaking to which Bly objected. Boone, unpersuaded, returned the fire with his Winchester, while the teamster hugged the earth and wondered why he'd come to this benighted place. About a hundred rounds later, as the teamster told it, what passed for silence returned to Neutral City…with nobody hurt.

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.

A persistent pest was a highly specialized breed of con man called the 'road-trotter.' These lowlifes filled their bellies by making specious claims on other people's land, either occupying the claim in the owner's absence or producing a forged instrument of title. They would generally go away if the owner bought them off, and they departed anyhow in most cases in which the owner cocked his shotgun.

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.

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