Imagine part of the early United States left unclaimed its residents country less having to survive completely on their own, not by some accident or bureaucratic mix up, but by an international agreement.
Never happen, you say.
Think again.
The following program is brought to you by America's byways Gateways to Adventure, where no two experiences are the same.
The National Scenic Byways Program invites you to come closer to America's heart by the Louisiana Office of Tourism.
Louisiana Feed your Soul and by Louisiana's Myths and Legends.
By way, from barely 20 years a Nation, the United States of America in 1803 negotiated one of the greatest land deals in the history of civilization by purchasing the Louisiana territories from France, but lost in nearly every historical account is the fact the deal did not go down without dispute.
The western boundary was pretty much undefined.
Thomas Jefferson believed that the United States had bought all the way to the Rio Grande.
Spain was not amenable to that.
The Spanish believed the border extended much further east into present day Louisiana.
And so in 1806, they send a fairly large force across the Sabine River.
The United States responded by calling troops and militia to repulse the perceived Spanish threat.
This tension was the result of decades of posturing between colonial empires and the new world over a neutral strip of land that, for one reason after another, had defied jurisdiction.
Now two international powers stood face to face, ready to defend their interests, a storied land of pirates and contraband, outlaws and lawlessness that bred a culture of fierce independence and self-reliance that still exists in the West and is celebrated to this day.
A precursor of what was to become the Wild West and one of the most unique and little known international border disputes in North American history.
The last piece of the puzzle in the 18th state becoming Louisiana.
In the early 1700s, France was claiming all the lands drained by the Mississippi River.
Spain was claiming the territory west of that.
The British colonies were a world away.
France made the first move in settling their claim by sending Louis Saint Deni to establish trade with the Natchitoches Indians in 1760.
So they were both looking to control the interior of North America, and they kind of come and meet really for the first time right here at Natchitoches and low sad eyes.
The purpose of.
Loss of Dias was really to protect the Spanish interest and to keep the French from moving into Spanish territory.
With no accurate maps and few distinguishing geographic features.
The generally accepted boundary between the colonial empires was the real Hondo and Calcasieu Rivers, and there is another empire of native peoples to contend with.
And it does set it apart from other places because you had a very benevolent Caddo Confederation here that in a sense welcomed both the Spanish and the French.
The Spanish were looking to convert them to Catholicism.
The French were just happy to trade with them.
Spain further secured its border by extending the Royal Road, the El Camino Real from Mexico City and making Loza Dyess the capital of Spanish, Texas, in 1729.
Then things changed.
In 1762, France ceded the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi and New Orleans to Spain, its territory east of the Mississippi, to Britain.
Lands that had been French became Spanish.
Even the French fought Saint Jean Baptiste in that condition with no border to protect.
Lucia Dias was abandoned in 1773 and the soldiers sent back to San Antonio.
But their story does not end there because their lives have become deeply intertwined with the land and the people of the neutral strip.
All those soldiers who were here are intermingled with our genealogy.
Run to go chasing descends from one such soldier, Gil Barba.
Ely Barba was the son of Mateo Ibarra, and Mateo was stationed here at Los Dias.
Aly Barba He was born here in 1729, and that's actually one of my grandfathers.
The political situation in Europe changed yet again, and in 1800, Spain ceded the Louisiana territory back to France and before the borders between the two empires could be reestablished.
In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana territory from France.
Spain was still claiming part.
Of what is now Louisiana because the boundaries of Spanish.
Texas was at Roebling.
When the United States bought that that land from France, they didn't really know exactly where that western boundary was.
South of Natchitoches, 72nd Parallel.
I think the US was a little bit reluctant to get into a war or get into a struggle with Spain over going ahead and pushing them back to the Sabine or even farther.
The United States was represented by General James Wilkinson, the Spanish by Simone de Herrera.
As Wilkinson pushes his troops further west, he decides he does not want to fight.
And so what Wilkinson proposes is that we all move back east of Rio Hondo, which is a boundary that went back all the way to the founding of Natchitoches and close to Dias.
This is a historic boundary between the two, between the French and the Spanish.
And the Spanish were to stay west of the Sabine River, according to Wilkinson's proposal.
And they made a gentlemen's agreement, literally saying for the time being, we will not send anyone to protect, to tax or to control the inhabitants of this area.
The strip between what we view as our territory and what we view as your territory, it's sort of this dissolve neutral strip.
And the way we're going to deal with it is just not bother with the people who are living there.
And in 1806, with this gentlemen's agreement, no man's land was born.
And until such time that diplomats could work out the details, there would be no new settlers, no government assistance and no law.
The quirkiness of the no man's land thing is essentially government making claims for things they had never explored and did not thoroughly understand.
Once those boundaries were specifically drawn out through a treaty by Simon de Herrera and General James Wilkinson, then you have a real line where people are realizing there's an opportunity there.
And in that space, all kinds of things took place because you have no form of official law or anyone that is answered to.
And so what happens then over time is that this becomes a place where, you know, the worst of the worst come.
One of the most popular outlaw legends is the story of John Muir, All the Reverend Devil.
The reason why they called him the Reverend Devil was because his father was a preacher and he learned the Bible early on.
The legend is that he could quote all ten of the commandments while he was breaking them.
Rumors abound of outlaws who buried their ill gotten gains in the Kazak forest close to the caves.
They hid out in strategically located near the El Camino Real.
The El Camino Real has long been known as a smuggling route between the French and the Spanish, dating back to almost its very beginnings.
Some legends talk about Spain transporting silver along that highway.
Outlaws or bandits were sort of populate those roads because that's where the money was.
There was lots of movement through no man's land of pioneers making their way west along the El Camino Real.
What really was driving this sort of westward expansion of the Americas, this idea that there were silver mines in this region, in New Spain that promised great wealth.
These settlers became easy prey for outlaws who had robbed the and simply vanished into the densely forested surroundings.
Attesting to the fact the damn neutral strip is curse of the devil.
Fairy crossings were another favorite for thieves who would lie in wait.
There are many stories about cattle thieves and rustlers and smugglers crossing the river in one direction, stealing cattle or goods, and then crossing again to escape.
This was the time that lawlessness, you could say you lawlessness occurred.
There was no lawlessness at all.
A time that drew pirates like the infamous John Lafitte, who was able to operate right out in the open.
Nobody was going to come here after him because they weren't going to send in militia who were not going to tax with.
So a thief, literally, when he came to southwest Louisiana, he was not a pirate.
He was not a privateer.
He was essentially a an early 19th century version of an Amazon.
He was actually bringing in goods and supplies.
Visit by Jailer Feet was viewed as a great boon because finally we can get gunpowder, we can get crockery, we can get textiles, we can get pots and pans, we can get guns, we can get this, that and the other.
Except people would have been one of the commodities.
Pirates would traffic.
The neutral strip and in terms of African-Americans would have been are African descended people would have been a place you went through.
Not that you stay because what happened is if you let's say you were a free black person traveling through the neutral strip and for whatever reason, no one no you or you didn't have the right papers or whatever.
Then someone would catch you, take you to Kentucky or Georgia somewhere else and really enslave you.
So that was not so where you want to be.
When the geography was here.
He was legal because there was no law, because this was no man's land, which makes it really unusual in terms of of telling history.
But there it is.
That's the history in southwest Louisiana.
And that's why the law so important to the neutral strip, because it's more about how people of the neutral strip survived and made a life in a region that was known as a tough place and drew the attention of outlaws.
Before no Man's land became known for its lawlessness.
There were generations of settlers who had no qualms about fending for themselves.
You had to skin your own scout and whatever.
You had to be independent.
You had to be self-sufficient.
And many of those pioneers just wanted to be left alone to make a living.
These were not plantation people.
These were not slave owning peoples, just small scale farmers working 15, 20 acres that could be farmed by the family.
And that became the predominant economy throughout.
What's going to become no man's land.
To the south, raising cattle was becoming a burgeoning industry.
And because of that, that sort of cowboy culture that you ordinarily associate with the American West of the of the 1870s is actually practiced in Louisiana 7080 years before the Texas the trail drives.
We have the trial drives here in Louisiana very, very, very early on.
Everything here was about survival.
The contraband trade began out of necessity due to the far eastern position of Los Dias.
It was hundreds of miles away from San Antonio.
The Spanish soldiers would trade things that they had gathered from throughout Texas.
They also traded native Americans that they had enslaved.
Samuel de Leon.
He was a French soldier at Fort Saint Jean-Baptiste, and he bought a lot pen.
Apache Indian woman named one of Maria, and he had three children with her.
And I descend from one of those three children.
The people were may have been poor in terms of their material culture, but they lived a subsistence pretty happy way of life, far away from any kind of central control or any kind of central Command.
This lack of government drew the Native American kushida to no man's land, a people who were looking for a place that offered peace, but most importantly, independence from outsider interference.
And it also drew the attention of a variety of other people who were looking for opportunity and a way of life.
Joseph Willis is an important figure in the neutral strip.
Some people say he was the First Baptist preacher West of the Mississippi River.
Willis was a freed man, the son of an Englishman and a Cherokee slave.
He first appears as a Protestant minister in Louisiana in 1798.
He was a huge figure in bringing religion to no man's land.
Part of what settled that region were these early churches.
They were the key factors of making a place stable.
Right.
And and they are basically indicative of how people settled the former church.
And you gather together and you worship, but you rely on each other for support.
We consider like the church is our Hispanic culture.
Everything revolving around the Catholic Church is St Joseph's, St and St Catherine's.
You know, that is all part of our culture.
I'm a member of the Choctaw Patchy Tribe, an evolved and our tribe is made up of predominantly Choctaw and Apache Native Americans that were in this area for many hundreds of years before the first Anglo American settlers came in.
And over time, all the cultures that had settled here, the Spanish, French, the Freedmen, Anglo Americans and Native American tribes all blended together to create a new culture unique to southwestern Louisiana, one that had as much to do with their spirit as it did their ethnicity.
The family connections are incredibly strong.
You survived.
You've got to continuously protect yourself against the elements, against people.
That's a hallmark of the neutral strip.
No man's land.
That is one of the things that is the most persistent aspect of the neutral strip mentality.
Like what neutral strip residents understand about themselves, that in order to survive in this place, especially early on, it took a pretty tough character.
My dad, Oh, it was tough to fight with him.
He was notorious for his fighting Wali, all him and his cousins.
But it wasn't that they were fighting against the system.
They were just fighting to let people know that they couldn't be pushed over.
I think if you live in a place that had attracted not only outlaws for a time, but also people who were trying to live independently, to live outside of the watchful eyes of a certain group, you had to develop the ability to take care of yourself.
You don't know these outside people, so you don't really want to let me in.
And that's the way they were.
And in 1821, the Adams O'Neill Treaty was ratified and Spain abandon it.
Any claim to territory east of the Sabine River, the western boundary of the new state of Louisiana, was set at the Sabine River.
I don't think Wilkinson or anybody at the time believed that the neutral strip would last that long.
No man's land would last that long.
No man's land years.
We're now Americans.
You just didn't have a land or a fence or a road or anything.
You step out and say, okay, I'm in.
I'm in no man's land.
It was so fluid.
Very fluid.
But a treaty could not stop what was already in place.
With the border question settled between Spain and Louisiana.
The anarchy prevalent throughout no man's land had to end.
And in 1822, Fort Jesup was established, situated on the El Camino Real, 15 miles from Natchitoches, and a day's march from the city, It functioned as the central stronghold of the new frontier, restoring law and order to the region.
Then, in 1830, a contingent of Fort Jessup soldiers was hurriedly dispatched to Lake Charles.
It was decided by the U.S. government that they needed to plant the flag somewhere in south Louisiana as quickly as possible.
The pirating that had flourished along the winding Calcasieu River during no man's land persisted can Stoneman Atkinson was erected.
The illicit activities were contained and the company returned to its home base.
The troops at Fort Jessup valiantly fulfilled their mission, serving until the threat at the border no longer existed.
With the annexation of Texas in 1846, with the signing of the Adams own peace treaty, no man's land now becomes part of Louisiana and the land is turned over to the United States.
And what begins is a process of recognizing that people were there and that people had some semblance of a claim to the land.
The Rio Hondo Land Claims Commission of 1824 sets up a four tier system to determine ownership.
The first and second tier claims were well established land holdings that were awarded ownership.
The fourth class claims were thrown out, held to be groundless.
Then there's a large third tier.
These were people eking out a living in the woods of the Cassadaga hills on the floodplain chain of the Calcasieu or the Sabine Rivers down towards the south.
These were people who were living very hard lives.
This is how you get your first real sense of who was there.
In our journey for federal recognition.
I served as the tribal genealogist for the Choctaw Apache Tribe of Ibar.
One remarkable fact about the tribe is that all of its members can trace at least one ancestor, if not more than one, to the original land grant.
You're dealing with a lot of people that their ancestors have been.
They're now going on 200 and actually going on close to 250 years.
Francisco Carmona was a Native American who was born at Los Dias, served the Spanish crown as a soldier at the Alamo for his military service to the Spanish crown.
He was given a land grant and his land was located in Sabine Parish and then became a no man's land here and then eventually became an American before his death.
And so it was through the Rio Hondo Land claims the first legal no man's land hours were officially recognized, despite the well-established borders of today, there's still a unique political, economic and cultural interconnectedness that exists in no man's land.
The sturdy and diverse settlers who weathered both prosperity and hopelessness with equal grace are still here.
They live on in the faces, the families and the myths and legends of today.
This inherited strength, independence and resilience is a proud no man's land legacy.
Though their ancestors faced thieves and bandits, as well as the complete lack of government and sovereignty.
They strive to to have that communal power.
And that's how they did it.
Not with a gun, not with a knife.
They educate their children to the point to where they could have possessions to help them strive to get what they wanted.
Is it any wonder no man's lenders still look to themselves and each other in times of difficulty and disaster.
Because they can't count on government coming in and bailing them out?
This is part of what makes no man's land still live.
They were resilient enough to survive, to do all this, and they're still doing it.
No man's land was brought to you by America's byways.
Gateways to adventure, where no two experiences are the same.
The National Scenic Byways Program invites you to come closer to America's heart by the Louisiana Office of Tourism, Louisiana Feed your Soul and by Louisiana's Myths and legends.
By way.
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