Fifty Years on the Owl Hoot Trail: Jim Herron, The First Sheriff of No Man's Land in Oklahoma Territory

James Herron left his father's ranch in Texas in 1879, at the age of thirteen to join a cattle drive heading for Dodge City, Kansas. The book tells of Herron¿s adventures growing up in Southwest Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle... how he became an open-range cowboy and eventually the first sheriff of No Man's Land in the Oklahoma Territory.
Herron's entrepreneurial spirit eventually led him to build up a herd of his own... something very much frowned upon by the Western Kansas Cattle Growers Association. When he shipped a load of beef to Nebraska, the Association sent inspectors who claimed to have found some of their brands among Herron's cattle. He was tried in Meade, Kansas, September 1893, and found guilty. Before he was to be sentenced, however, he and his sidekick, Jack Rhodes, escaped. Jack was shot and died on the outskirts of Meade, but Herron made it to "No Mans Land" where the law couldn't touch him. He spent the rest of his life running from the law... a situation the cowboys called being on the "owl hoot trail."