No Man's Land Museum

From 1850 to 1890 the strip that is now the Oklahoma Panhandle had no government at all. The people who settled it after 1885 could not file a homestead claim, so they surveyed quarter sections themselves from the zinc markers left by government surveyors in 1881, and they ran their own claim boards, courts and schools. The Post Office Department could only put post offices in states and territories, so it pretended the Tarbox ranch was in Texas and opened one there in 1880. From 1883 the strip's mail went out postmarked N.S.I.T., Neutral Strip of Indian Territory, which it never was. From late 1886 into early 1889 a provisional government met for a Cimarron Territory that Congress never approved. The settlers called the place No Man's Land, but God's Land.

Some of those settlers founded the No Man's Land Historical Society in 1934 to keep their papers and belongings, and the society runs the museum with Oklahoma Panhandle State University in Goodwell. The 10,000-square-foot building gives four rooms to the ranchers and homesteaders and the people who lived through the Depression and the Dust Bowl. A large fifth room holds chipped stone tools, grinding stones and pottery from the much older lives of Native people in the region, and others hold fossils and geology, including dinosaur footprints and casts from near Kenton, the desks of the strip's two delegates to the 1906 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, horse-drawn freight wagons and a large barbed wire collection.