Turpin: Into No Man's Land

Welcome to the Oklahoma Panhandle, thirty-four miles wide and about one hundred sixty-seven miles long, a strip that once belonged to no state, no territory, no government at all. After Texas ceded this land in the Compromise of eighteen fifty, it drifted for decades as No Man's Land, a magnet for outlaws and squatters operating beyond any legal reach. Congress finally attached it to Oklahoma Territory in eighteen ninety.

The hamlet of Turpin, one of the panhandle's tiny communities, took its name from railroad manager Carl Julian Turpin, who pushed tracks through Beaver County so wheat farmers could get their crops to market. Driving through here, the sky presses down flat and vast in every direction, and it is easy to understand why this particular strip of the continent resisted easy jurisdiction for so long.