Fort Smith, Arkansas, sits on the Mississippi River on the border with Oklahoma. The town was founded as a military outpost in 1817. The Osage tribe hunted on land that would become Arkansas. In the 18th century, Cherokee displaced by white settlers from Georgia and other parts of the South, began to compete for land and resources with the Osage. The two tribes warred. Fort Smith, fortified by a a thick stone wall, was erected to keep the peace.
Just 20 years later, Osage, Choctaw, Cherokee, and other members of the 5 tribes, found themselves in Fort Smith, their last stop on the Trail of Tears, before they were dragged into the wilds of present-day Oklahoma.
In the intervening years, “civilizing” efforts had led many members of the tribes to embrace white ways. They took up agriculture; adopted white American modes of dress. Their kids were shipped off to missionary schools. None of that mattered when the rabid hunger for land made the federal government throw out treaty after treaty and kidnap 60,000 people from their ancestral homelands. 10,000 died from disease and starvation.
So-called “Indian Country” did not fall under federal jurisdiction, so the area attracted criminals of every type, from horse thieves to murderers and rapists. They preyed on the Native-American population, vulnerable after the forced displacement. In 1875, Judge Isaac C. Parker was appointed to the Western District of Arkansas at Fort Smith to restore order. Parker deputized hundreds of federal Marshalls to go into Indian territory to hunt down whites who had warrants out for their arrest. They got their fee only if they brought back the fugitive alive.
Over his 21 year tenure, Parker sentenced 160 men to death, earning the nickname “The Hanging Judge.”
The mythos of the American West, of lawmen and outlaws, largely coalesced here. “Explore life on the edge of frontier and Indian Territory through the stories of soldiers, the Trail of Tears, scandals, outlaws, and lawmen who pursued them,” writes the National Parks Service in tourism copy. Films like Clint Eastwoods “Hang ‘Em High” “Bell Starr, the Bandit Queen” “Rooster Cogburn and the Lady (John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn) were all loosely based on historical characters who passed through Fort Smith.
The gallows still sits next to the old courthouse. It’s said Parker and the men he sentenced to death haunt the grounds. When I went there on a relatively warm winter day I tried to conjure up the horror—feel something of their ghosts—but there aren’t nooses, so it doesn’t look much different than a stage. I only felt a shiver of revulsion when I looked more closely at the steps — 10 in all — and thought about that walk up to a painful death, as a crowd looked on (Parker himself never attended an execution).
When I learned about “The Hanging Judge” I assumed he’d been a monster and a sadist. But Parker was a progressive. He believed in women’s suffrage and was sympathetic to the plight of the 5 tribes, dragged into the “Wild West” against their will. He even said he favored abolishing the death penalty! “I am in favor of abolishing the death penalty provided there is a certainty of punishment,” he once said. “Whatever the punishment may be. It is not the severity of punishment but the certainty of it that checks crime.”
But the law was the law. And the hangings would send a message that the US government had had enough of lawlessness.
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