Arkansas: Our visit to Fort Smith

From the Plains to Fort Smith — Broncos, Bad Men and a Judge Called “The Hangman”

We’d been driving for what felt like forever across Oklahoma, and frankly, if you’ve seen one flat, featureless stretch of the Great Plains, you’ve seen them all. So as we pushed east from Tulsa towards Fort Smith in Arkansas, it was genuinely cheering to watch the landscape start to pull itself together. The barren, windswept plains gradually gave way to rolling hills, thickening vegetation, and actual honest-to-goodness woodland. Being this far south meant the trees were still holding onto their autumn leaves, putting on a proper show of yellows, reds and oranges — the kind of display that would have had a BBC nature presenter reaching for superlatives.

Naturally, it was grey, blustery and thoroughly miserable. Because of course it was. This is, in spirit if not geography, essentially a British holiday.

The wind did more than ruin the view, mind you. Since we acquired a roof box for the van, we’ve essentially converted our vehicle into a large, expensive sail. On a day like that, driving felt less like motoring through the American heartland and more like wrestling an angry horse down the motorway. The van lurched, swayed and generally did its best to end up in a ditch, which, as any driver will tell you, is exhausting in a way that no amount of service station coffee can fix.

We pulled into Fort Smith in the mid-afternoon, which left us with a bit of time to kill. Never ones to waste a perfectly good afternoon sitting in the van arguing about where to have dinner, we headed to the Fort Smith National Historic Site — and very glad we were too.

Fort Smith sits on the banks of the Arkansas River, right at the point where Arkansas butts up against what is now Oklahoma. The original fort was established here in 1817, its primary purpose being to keep the peace along a frontier that was, by all accounts, not particularly peaceful. The United States was expanding westward at a rate that would have impressed even the most aggressive of estate agents, and the native tribes who had called this land home for centuries were about to have a very bad time indeed.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson — a man who had built much of his military reputation fighting Native Americans — pushed through the Indian Removal Act. It remains one of the more shameful pieces of legislation in American history, not that the textbooks always put it quite that bluntly. Five of the major southeastern tribes — the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, often referred to collectively as the “Five Civilised Tribes,” somewhat patronisingly — were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral homelands in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida. They were rounded up into holding camps — let’s call them what they were, concentration camps — and then marched hundreds of miles westward to what the government had designated “Indian Territory,” essentially the land that is now Oklahoma and Kansas.

The conditions were appalling. People marched in harsh weather with inadequate food, clothing and shelter. Thousands died along the way — estimates for the Cherokee removal alone suggest somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths out of a population of around 16,000 who made the journey. The routes these people were forced to travel became known, with bleak accuracy, as the Trail of Tears — Nunna daul Tsuny in Cherokee, meaning roughly “the trail where they cried.”

The more you learn about all this, the worse it gets. And the uncomfortable truth is that the suffering didn’t stop in 1830 — the consequences ripple right through to the present day, in health outcomes, poverty rates and a dozen other measures where Native American communities continue to sit at the bottom of every table. One does rather wonder whether the government might choose to do more about it, if it genuinely wanted to. One suspects it doesn’t particularly want to.

As the 19th century wore on and white settlement expanded further, the Indian Territories presented a different kind of problem. Being sovereign land — technically outside US jurisdiction — they became something of a magnet for criminals, outlaws and general ne’er-do-wells of every background, who quickly worked out that crossing the territorial line was a handy way of making themselves very difficult to arrest. By the 1870s, Fort Smith had reinvented itself accordingly, shifting from frontier military post to the seat of federal law enforcement for a vast and deeply lawless region.

The man charged with imposing some semblance of order on this chaos was Judge Isaac Parker, who arrived in Fort Smith in 1875 and served for 21 years. Parker earned the nickname “the Hanging Judge,” which gives you a reasonable sense of his judicial philosophy. He was, by most accounts, neither a monster nor a sadist — he appears to have been a genuinely conscientious man who took his responsibilities seriously and was particularly concerned with protecting the rights of Native Americans within his jurisdiction. But he presided over a court that sentenced 160 men to death, of whom 79 were actually hanged, and he did so without the right of appeal to a higher federal court for the first fourteen years of his tenure. Make of that what you will.

To enforce his writs across hundreds of miles of dangerous territory, Parker recruited a corps of US Marshals — tough, often battle-hardened men who rode into Indian Territory alone or in small groups to bring back wanted criminals. It was extraordinarily dangerous work. Over the course of Parker’s tenure, more than 60 marshals were killed in the line of duty. Among the most celebrated was Bass Reeves, a formerly enslaved man who became one of the first Black deputy marshals west of the Mississippi and is thought by some historians to have been a partial inspiration for the Lone Ranger. He arrested over 3,000 people during his career and shot fourteen men in self-defence. Quite a CV.

The museum does an excellent job of bringing all of this history to life. It occupies the old barracks and prison complex — a building that, in its heyday, went by the wonderfully grim nickname “Hell on the Border.” The cells are cramped, dark and thoroughly unpleasant, and the exhibits make no effort to soften what went on here. They have even reconstructed the gallows in the courtyard — a sombre, heavy structure capable of hanging up to a dozen men simultaneously. Standing in front of it, you find yourself going rather quiet.

It’s a lot to take in on a grey Tuesday afternoon. But it’s the kind of history that deserves to be taken in, uncomfortable as it is.