For instance, it is said that in the 1880s, rancher Jim Beasley killed the last wild buffalo in No Man's Land but not for sport or profit.
"It was an old bull that got kicked out of its herd and took up with the cattle. They'd look out at the haystack and he'd be up on top of it," said Prentis "Cap" Beasley, 88, of Guymon, Jim Beasley's son.
"They finally killed it when it got so old it couldn't eat."
And once, Cap Beasley said his father told him, several buffalo mixed with the cattle and couldn't be cut out at roundup time, and wound up being shipped by rail with them to Kansas City "and the damn things brought about three times more than the cows did."
There perhaps are as many centennial-type stories in the Oklahoma Panhandle as there are yucca plants and tumbleweeds. For instance, it is said that in the 1880s, rancher Jim Beasley killed the last …
www.oklahoman.com
‘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.
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.
Until the last decade of the 19th Century, the long, narrow strip that would become known as the Oklahoma Panhandle had no government and plenty of men who didn't mind at all.
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