Today, the tip of the Oklahoma panhandle is the state's least populous county: Cimarron County. Cimarron is the only county in the nation that borders counties in a hard-to-believe five different states: Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.
It's also the site of Black Mesa, the state's highest point and a rugged wilderness full of surprises: dinosaur bones, ghost towns, and wagon tracks from the Santa Fe Trail. Today, the land that nobody wanted is a surprisingly great road-trip destination. But, sadly, Beer City is no more. The Daily Our most popular newsletter for destination inspiration, travel tips, trip itineraries, and everything else you need to be an expert traveler in this beautiful world.
Because potential settlers believed the Neutral Strip to be in Indian Territory, cattlemen operated there without much competition for land until Responding to an inquiry in that year from a Strip resident, the U. Land Office affirmed that the Public Land Strip was not a part of Indian Territory but belonged instead to the federal public lands subject to squatters' rights. News of this opinion reached Kansas newspapers, and soon a steady flood of land-hungry farmers trekked into the Public Land Strip.
They found no land office and no government surveys to facilitate homesteading or squatting. Undeterred, they surveyed the land into quarter sections themselves, referring to zinc pot markers left by surveyors at two-mile intervals along six-mile-square congressional townships surveyed in across the Strip. They then squatted on their claims, hoping to acquire legal title in time.
These claims tended to fan out from the trails and trail towns, staying near creeks and streams. Little serious farming took place. Few squatters could afford seed and equipment, and grain markets were too far away for meaningful profits. Most of the Strip's squatters practiced subsistence farming. Men often took jobs in towns far back east, and their families stayed to hold onto the claim.
Some derived extra income by collecting buffalo bones for fertilizer. These were very hard years, marked by blizzards and drought, and most squatters would abandon their claims forever to join the Land Run. Communities emerged rapidly after , and thirty post offices were established within the Public Land Strip before All but three were in the eastern half of the Strip, near the trails connecting Dodge City to Tascosa and Mobeetie.
Given no territorial or state government, each squatter community improvised its own local agencies, such as land claims boards, courts, and schools. Vigilante committees enforced order, and some communities hired men to operate as town sheriffs. The Strip had its claim jumpers, horse thieves, and other bad elements, but the "old settlers" often emphasized in later years that the Strip had relatively few outlaws compared to other regions, due as much to the uniformly shared poverty as to vigilante severity.
Local committees resolved disputes over squatters' land claims. Claim jumpers were banished or, if they persisted, could be shot or hanged. Some communities maintained documentary records of land claims, and some even formed townsite companies and promoted and sold town lots with quit-claim deeds. The people of the Strip governed themselves and maintained civil order for more than five years without a central government.
For this latter accomplishment the old settlers of the Strip often felt unappreciated in later years. Between and Strip residents actively sought rights to homestead their claims. The most ambitious effort was the attempt to gain territorial status under the name of Cimarron Territory.
Although failing Congressional approval, the Cimarron Territory Provisional Government met from late into early Strip residents also sent letters and petitions to federal offices, but these likewise failed to secure a land office and homestead rights.
True to the plain language of the old West, the nickname referred simply to the fact that no man could legally own land in the Strip. 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. 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. 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. 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. Twice he and his men escaped unscathed, but the third holdup, on August 16, , was a mistake. For this time the stalwart conductor, Frank E.
Now I believe you. Ketchum, tried in New Mexico Territory, departed this earth in memorable fashion. Let her rip! There were a good many of the former, thanks in large measure to ax-wielding Carry Nation and her Anti-Saloon League. Liberal, just across the Kansas line, was an especially thirsty town. The Rock Island railhead reached Liberal in the spring of , a stockyard appeared, and the cattlemen and cowboys followed. 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. The town had other kinds of entertainment, too, much of it unplanned and violent.
There was, for example, the day on which Pussy Cat Nell, madam of the house above the Yellow Snake Saloon, ushered town marshal Lew Bush into the next world with her shotgun. Besides, she ran an essential service, and Marshal Bush had been rustling on the side.
Since Beer City and its competitors were a very long way from any kind of real distillery, and since cowboys seldom cared much what sort of booze they drank, the liquor supply, such as it was, tended to come from local sources. 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. The best-known still was run by the man who would appear in 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. They had a great seal made and used it to fire off petitions to Washington, D. 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 made it part of brand-new Oklahoma Territory. 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 , 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:. 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. Even the provisional government folded up. And so, when the Oklahoma lands to the east opened for settlement in , many people pulled up stakes and joined the land rush.
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. In Beaver City, district court was held in a room above a saloon, and on occasion the uproar downstairs interfered with the dignity of the proceedings upstairs.
On one such day the judge turned quietly to Madsen, who was traveling with the court, and ordered him to abate the noise beneath. So Madsen turned to direct action, shooting one man through the hand and pistol-whipping the other two.
What disposition shall I make of the prisoners?
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