A mind to stay: on encountering the panhandle of Texas

Venturing into unfamiliar territory, reflective travellers struggle to place it as much as to place themselves in it. In this article, the author draws on six nineteenth‐century accounts to examine ways in which that struggle has taken place in and around what is now known as the Texas Panhandle, in southwestern United States. Interplay of political and natural boundaries was characteristic of many twentieth‐century conflicts and continues to inform conflict in the twenty‐first century, so the experience of the Panhandle, which was placed in the context of a series of nineteenth‐century border disputes, may prove instructive.