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.

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Not long after that, Williams, perhaps still smarting from prickly pear, decided to drink up most of Neutral City. For entertainment, he began firing over the heads of an inoffensive man and woman chopping wood. ‘Just watch how fast settlers can run,’ he said to a companion, and the terrified couple did indeed run. The man ran, however, even faster than Williams thought possible, collecting his shotgun and cutting through his cornfield to confront the Bad Man of Gate City farther down the trail. Astonished at finding the settler armed and angry, Williams reached for his pistol. He was too slow.

Another badman, returning drunk from Neutral City in the middle of the night, took a notion to shoot up a settler’s soddy. He and a companion galloped around the terrified granger’s shack, firing into the walls and windows. The granger was alone, and had only a muzzleloading shotgun and no shot, but he primed his ancient weapon and broke up a cast-iron teakettle into pieces small enough to cram down the bore. Then he turned loose both barrels, and when the smoke cleared, the local bully had ceased to breathe. His companion, bleeding, departed into the night, never to return. Like the demise of Bill Williams, the bully’s death seemed to follow from his sins like a rainbow from the rain.

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.

In addition to the general run of no-goods, No Man’s Land was amply supplied with liquor sellers and whores. There were a good many of the former, thanks in large measure to ax-wielding Carry Nation and her Anti-Saloon League. Carry’s depredations up in Kansas had pretty well dried up the Sunflower State, and the nearest place to get a legal drink for many Kansans was No Man’s Land. While moonshine did get imported into Kansas, much of it from No Man’s Land, drinking in the bunkhouse wasn’t nearly the same as pouring ‘em down in a real saloon.

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.

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