Fort Smith National Historic Site, on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border in the city of Fort Smith, preserves one of the first military posts in the West. Fort Smith has a long and varied history. It served as a military installation for much of the early and middle 1800’s and then as a federal courthouse during the late 1800’s.
Responding to white settlers’ demands for more land, the United States government pressured the Cherokee Indians to move from their homes in Georgia and Tennessee to land in Arkansas. Beginning in 1812, thousands of Cherokee moved west into an area near the Osage Indians. The Osage thought the Cherokee were invading their land, and disputes over territory and hunting rights arose. Major William Bradford, head of a company of U.S. Army riflemen, established the fort in 1817. The post was intended to keep peace between the warring Osage and Cherokee Indians. The site for the fort, called Belle Point by European settlers, was on a bluff overlooking the junction of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers. The fort was named for General Thomas A. Smith, commander of the ninth military department.
In 1824, the U.S. Army established Fort Gibson west of Fort Smith, and soldiers abandoned Fort Smith. Congress later passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The act called for the removal of all Indians in the southeastern United States to a territory west of the Mississippi River. Their new land, in what is now Oklahoma, became known as the Indian Territory. Settlers in the region worried about continuing violence. In 1838, the Army established a second Fort Smith near the ruins of the first fort.
During the winter of 1838-1839, U.S. troops forced the remaining Cherokee to move from their homelands to the Indian Territory. The Cherokee called their forced march the Trail of Tears. Fort Smith was the end of the water route for the Cherokee who traveled by boat.
During the early 1840’s, General Zachary Taylor, who later became the 12th president of the United States, commanded the fort. By 1845, the Army converted the second Fort Smith into a supply depot. The fort supplied other forts in the Indian Territory. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Confederate troops occupied Fort Smith until 1863. That year, Union troops captured the fort and held it until the end of the war.
By 1871, the fort was no longer needed. The city that grew up around the post became the seat of the U.S. Court for the Western District of Arkansas. The court had jurisdiction over western Arkansas and the Indian Territory, which had become a refuge for outlaws. The fort’s barracks became the courtroom and jail. Judge Isaac C. Parker presided over the court from 1875 to 1896. He was known as a “hanging judge” because he sentenced 160 men to death, 79 of whom were hanged.
The fort was designated a historic site in 1961. Exhibits at the site focus on the fort’s military history from 1817 to 1871, Indian removal, and Judge Parker and the federal court. In 2000, the National Park Service completed a major restoration project at Fort Smith. Visitors can tour the barracks, which later served as Judge Parker’s courthouse and jail, and see reproductions of court furnishings from the 1880’s in the restored courtroom. The jail that held prisoners from 1871 to 1889 and a reproduction of the gallows used for executions are also at the site.
See also Cherokee; Fort Smith; Trail of Tears.
