The Wild West of No Man's Land

What if I told you there’s a strip of America that once belonged to absolutely nobody

and it turned into a Wild West smuggling hotspot? This is the Oklahoma Panhandle — a 34-mile-tall,

166-mile-long rectangle once known as No Man’s Land. In 1850, Texas was forced

to give up this area because it sat north of the line that banned slavery.

So overnight, this land became ownerless. For nearly 40 years, no state claimed

it. No laws. No government. Just open prairie. And that’s when

things got wild. Smugglers, outlaws, and drifters flooded in.

Everything from whiskey to stolen cattle moved through this legal loophole. Locals even tried