Long before the lease, this was home to the Lugbara, Kakwa, Bari, and Moru peoples. Then the outsiders came. Egypt claimed the region, and in 1869 Samuel Baker set up an administration at Gondokoro and moved to suppress the slave trade. Charles Gordon succeeded him in 1874 and, disliking Gondokoro's climate, founded a new centre downstream that he named Lado, laying it out like an Indian cantonment with wide straight streets and shade trees. He pushed cotton, sesame, and sorghum. His successor, Emin Pasha, built Lado into a real town with a mosque, a Koranic school, and a hospital, until by 1881 it counted more than five thousand round mud huts. A Russian explorer fleeing the Mahdist revolt praised its brick buildings and tidy lanes.

Britain wanted a Cape-to-Cairo railway and a buffer, so it handed Leopold the Nile basin south of the tenth parallel for his lifetime, linking his Congo to the navigable river. France forced him to renounce any push further north. It took until 1897 for his forces under Chaltin to fight their way to the Nile and break the Mahdists at the Battle of Rejaf, securing the claim. But Leopold could never make Lado work. Rejaf became the head of navigation, where Nile rapids stopped the boats, and a single European commander held the post. Twelve heavy Krupp guns were dragged in to defend it. Yet because the enclave would die with Leopold, the Congo Free State never built a real government, and civil unrest festered. Many Bari simply crossed the Nile to escape Free State rule entirely.

Leopold died in December 1909, and the lease died with him. On 10 June 1910 the enclave became a province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, with a British administrator appointed. But on the ground, almost nothing happened. The Belgians withdrew, the British neglected to move in, and for a stretch the place was simply ungoverned, a genuine no man's land roughly the size of a small country with a population of around a quarter of a million. Later the southern half went to Uganda and was renamed West Nile, the region best known as the homeland of Idi Amin. The old river towns of Gondokoro, Kiro, Lado, and Rejaf were eventually abandoned, fading off the maps entirely.

Into that ungoverned gap poured the ivory hunters. Within about six weeks of Leopold's death, gentlemen adventurers were crossing the Nile from Uganda, shooting elephants by the dozen, and carrying the tusks back before any official could stop them. The enclave became, in the phrase of the time, the site of the last big elephant hunt on the continent. Between roughly 1907 and 1909, hunters from around the world converged and killed several thousand elephants; one resident herd estimated at two thousand animals was all but wiped out. The most famous of these men, Walter Bell, known as Karamojo Bell, shot more than a thousand elephants across his career. The slaughter made fortunes and emptied the land. Lado entered legend as the supposed site of the mythical elephants' graveyard, an exotic byword in the stories of Churchill, Kitchener, and Hemingway, who all knew its name.