after Mythcon

Since Mythcon was being held in a slice of territory entirely new to me, I decided to spend a little post-Mythcon time exploring that territory further. What most interested me was the Oklahoma Panhandle. Center of the Dust Bowl long ago (I found Ken Burns's documentary on that subject one of his more successful efforts), it interests me as a geography buff as one of the few places in the US where as many as five states are so close together. It would be fun, I thought, to tag all five of them.

So that's what I did. Monday after the con, I drove northwest through Oklahoma, visited the Washita Battlefield NHS, where Custer massacred the Indians instead of the other way around (captions in the site museum are very sorrowful about the whole thing), cut through a corner of Texas, back into Oklahoma, and finally into Kansas, where I stayed for the night in the improbably-named border town of Liberal.

Tuesday was the real action day. I was in KS-OK-TX-OK-KS-CO-OK-NM-OK-TX-NM. Colorado was the most challenging of these: thirty miles of unpaved road. Generally, though, it was pleasant. The temperature was hot, but the fields of grain - mostly cattle feed - were green and the aspect pleasant. People I stopped and chatted with, at museums and gas station convenience stores, were friendly and agreeable. Only in the very farthest extent of the panhandle did the gently rolling land turn jagged, with buttes and arroyo canyons. It would have been a good spot to take a photo for one of those "what state is this?" competitions; few would have been likely to guess Oklahoma.

In the Oklahoma town of Goodwell, home of the local college, is a museum on the history of the panhandle. This slab of territory has a curious jurisdictional history. Before it was attached to Oklahoma Territory in 1890, it wasn't part of anything, the victim of political machinations and accidental omission back in the 1850s. For forty years it had no US civil authority whatever, and settlers came in at their own risk (not usually staying long, more because of the brutal climate than the lack of any legal right to buy their lands.) Because of this absence, it was known as No Man's Land, and the museum in Goodwell is the No Man's Land Museum.

Nobody was at the museum when I arrived at the 10 am opening time except me and the curator. She asked me, what did I know about No Man's Land, and I answered with a brief version of my understanding of the jurisdictional history. "That's good," she said. "A lot of people come in here expecting a museum about World War I."

Venturing further into New Mexico, I explored two further NPS sites: the Capulin Mountain NM, an extinct cinder cone where you can drive a road that twists up the mountainside as far as the crater; and next day to Salinas Pueblo Missions NM, three abandoned spots in the desert which all have the same thing: fragments of the buildings of a once-thriving pueblo, and the better-preserved remains of a Spanish church built in the 17th century and which flourished for a few years until, partly due to Spanish interference, the pueblo began to collapse.

DT would not be happy with the historical interpretation either here or at Washita, so nobody tell him about it.