Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 98, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 April 1913 — KIT CARSON’S FRIEND [ARTICLE]

KIT CARSON’S FRIEND

Cattleman Tells How “No Ulan’s Land” Was Created. Btrlp Now a Part of Texas and Kansas Was Rendezvous for Rustlers, Bandits and Murderers. Kansas City. Mo.—L. A. Allen, a cattleman, who has an office at the Kansas City stockyards, says that the encyclopedias are all wrong about how No Man’s land came to be created. Mr. Allen was a cattleman,on the plains and mountains for fifty years. He was a boy when he went from Kansas City with the first herd of cattle ever driven over toe plain.*. For the following fifty years he was in the cattle business in all parts of the west He was the Intimate friend of Kit Carson and he was with the wife of Carson when she died and he buried her in his own garden. He was with Carson when he died. His brother married the only daughter of Kit Carson and they are living now in Trinidad, Colo. No Man’s land used to be the strip of land 167 miles long and 36 miles wide between Texas on the south and Kansas on the north. Later it was known as Beaver connty. Now it is made up of Cimarron, Texas and Beaver counties, Oklahoma. "None of the books tells the time story of how that came to be known as No Man’s land,” said Mr. Allen to a reporter. “The truth about it is this: In the war between Mexico and the United StAtes this country took all of the country south of the Arkansas river in what Is now Colorado and all of New Mexico, Arxonia. Call-, fornia and Texas. In the treaty that ceded this vast territory to the United States It was stipulated that for the benefit of toe Mexicans living lu New Mexico, who were accustomed to trading with the Indians of the Indian territory, they should be given a free roadway from New Mexico Into the Indian country and a neutral strip was laid out 167 miles long and about 36 miles wide that was since known as the Neutral strip, and No Man’s land.

"The Mexicans were atm using that atrip aa a trading route when 1 went out there fifty yearn ago. And then It waa gradually abandoned aa a trading route, and aa there waa no government with Jurisdiction over It and courts could not be established there, It became a rendezvous for the worst outlaws of the southwest, who would run out of there and commit depredations and“then drop back to the shelter of the neutral strip. "One of the worst bands that found refuge there was the Coe outfit Its headquarters were on the Cimarron river In the southwest corner of the strip, and It had a stone fort there a hundred miles from a settlement I was at that time captain of a con*

pany of rangers In southeast Colorado. I was the first sheriff of southeast Colorado when it was a territory, and May 8, 1868, we pulled off the first election ever held In j Colorado. “We were to the cattle business, and one time we got word that Coe and his band were coming to run off our cattle. I called my company together and we rode out, and by traveling at night we came to an abandoned ’dobe where the gang was resting for the night. We tied our horses a distance away, and with a revolver in one hand and a rifle in the other we crept up to the cabin, burst In toe door and took the whole eleven and hanged them to toe cottonwood trees along the river bank. "Coe was not In the adobe hut. He was at another place fifteen miles away, and we rode there and captured

him, and as there was A big reward for him we strapped him to a horse and rode with him 100 miles to Pueblo and surrendered him to the sheriff, who put him In Jail. .4 t "I lived with Kit Carson in Taos, N. M., when I was a boy, and I suppose that I was toe closest friend he had. His wife died at my ranch. They had seven children, the youngest being a baby of two weeks. Mrs. Carson was very sick, and two Mexican women were nursing her. “Carson was suffering with heart trouble, and he and I were lying together on a bed In another room and he was telling me of some adventure of his. We did not expect Mrs. Carr son to die, and when suddenly the Mexican woman ran in crying, ’Bhe Is dead!’ and then the six children ran in and all of them piled on the bed on top of Kit, and he wept with them. > buried his wife in onr garden. Two weeks later he died and I buried him, too.”