The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online

Oklahoma is destined to be the greatest wheat-growing country in the world."
    No Man's Land had been one of the last places in the United States where a person could hide, and nobody cared enough to come look for them, or to get lost, never to be found again. For nearly 350 years after Coronado marched through, the land remained unwanted.
    "Not a single landmark is to be seen for forty miles—scarcely a visible eminence by which to direct one's course," wrote Josiah Gregg while traveling between the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers in 1831. Gregg was a meticulous note-taker, but he was exaggerating. The land bunches up at the western edge, near Black Mesa, and a few stunted pinon and cedar trees grow in the north-facing draws there. Gregg told a story about Captain William Becknell, the first to try a shortcut from the Santa Fe Trail in 1822 and angle through No Man's Land. Becknell and his thirty men ran out of water and wandered, near death, till they killed a bison and cut open its stomach, drinking fluids from the animal's insides to save themselves. For additional hydration, they cut the ears of their mules and drank the blood, Gregg wrote.
    Five flags had flown over No Man's Land. Spain was the first to claim it, but two expeditions and reports from traders reinforced the view that the land was best left to the "humped-back cows" and their pursuers, the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache. Spain gave the territory to Napoleon. The French flag flew for all of twenty days, until the emperor turned around and sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A subsequent survey put the land in Mexico's hands, an extension of their rule over Texas in 1819. Seventeen years later, the newly independent Republic of Texas claimed all territory north to Colorado. But when Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, it was on the condition that no new slave territory would rise above 36.5 degrees in latitude, the old Missouri Compromise line. That left an orphaned rectangle, 35 miles wide and 210 miles long, that was not attached to any territory or state in the West, and it got its name, No Man's Land. The eastern boundary, at the one hundredth meridian, was where the plains turned unlivably arid, unfit for Jefferson's farmer-townbuilders.
    In the late nineteenth century, one corner of the Panhandle served as a roost for outlaws, thieves, and killers. The Coe Gang was known for dressing like Indians while attacking wagon trains on the Cimarron Cutoff. The Santa Fe Railroad pushed a line as far as Liberal, Kansas, on the Panhandle border, in 1888. Kansas was dry. And so a place called Beer City sprang up just across the state line: a hive of bars, brothels, gambling houses, smuggling dens, and town developers on the run. The first settlement in No Man's Land, Beer City lasted barely two years before it was carted away in pieces. Law, taxes, and land title companies finally came to the Panhandle in 1890, when the long, undesired stretch was stitched to Oklahoma Territory.
    The name
Oklahoma
is a combination of two Choctaw words—
okla,
which means "people," and
humma,
the word for "red." The red people lost the land in real estate stampedes that produced instant towns—Oklahoma City, Norman, and Guthrie among them. But the great land rushes never made it out to the Panhandle. No Man's Land was settled, finally, when there was no other land left to take.
    It was a hard place to love; a tableau for mischief and sudden death from the sky or up from the ground. Hazel Lucas, a daring little girl with straw-colored hair, first saw the grasslands near the end of a family journey to claim a homestead. Hazel got up on the tips of her toes in the horse-drawn wagon to stare into an abyss of beige. It was as empty as the back end of a day, a wilderness of flat. The family clawed a hole in the side of the prairie just south of Boise City. It was not the promised land Hazel had imagined, but it had ... possibility. She was thrilled to