The Neutral Ground, sometimes called the Sabine Free State, was a buffer zone established on November 5, 1806, by an agreement between American General James Wilkinson and Spanish Lieutenant Colonel Simon de Herrera, intended to prevent armed conflict over the disputed western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. The zone stretched roughly between the Arroyo Hondo on the east and the Sabine River on the west, an area that today spans parts of western Louisiana and includes Logansport on the Texas side of the river. Rather than being administered by either government, the Neutral Ground was deliberately left ungoverned: both the United States and Spain agreed to withhold military and civil authority from the territory, and it functioned for roughly fifteen years as a lawless no-man's-land beyond the reach of either nation's law. It attracted outlaws, smugglers, deserters, political refugees, and fortune hunters, including organized highwaymen who preyed on travelers, and its unsettled character left a lasting legacy of vigilante violence in East Texas, including the later Regulator-Moderator War. The dispute was formally resolved by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, ratified in 1821, which fixed the Sabine River as the boundary and ended the zone's neutral status. Today the episode is commemorated by a historical marker near Logansport, functioning as a roadside interpretive landmark rather than an active site, and by an annual Sabine Free State heritage festival recalling the area's unusual frontier history.