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Why It Started and What People Did There
Sebastian County's history is Fort Smith's history, and Fort Smith's history begins with a military calculation. In 1817, the United States Army established a garrison at the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Poteau River — at a spot called Belle Point — to manage the volatile border between the Osage people's territory and the land that the relocated Cherokee from the East had been assigned. The fort was named for General Thomas Smith, and the settlement that grew up around it took the same name. Fort Smith was, from its beginning, a place that existed because of the contested nature of everything around it: the Indian Territory border to the west, the wild country of the Arkansas River canyon to the east, the constant movement of displaced and dispossessed people through a landscape that the federal government was still deciding how to organize.
Sebastian County was created by the Arkansas legislature in 1851. The county seat — and the dominant city — was Fort Smith. When the Civil War came, the fort changed hands: Confederate troops occupied it early, Union forces took it back in July 1863, and for the remainder of the war it served as a Union garrison town and a refuge for formerly enslaved people, Unionists, and war refugees seeking protection behind Federal lines. Among the Union units assigned to garrison the fort was the 2nd Kansas Battery — which means that Andrew Jackson Foster, who served with Kansas forces during the war, may well have found himself stationed at a fort his father Jarrett had known from a very different angle: the Cherokee removal crossings of 1837–38. The same geography, a generation apart, on opposite sides of the same history. When the war ended and Reconstruction settled the border country into its post-war form, Fort Smith found itself positioned exactly on the line between Arkansas proper and Indian Territory — which made it, almost inevitably, the jurisdiction through which the federal court administered justice for crimes committed in the Territory.
Judge Isaac Parker — the "Hanging Judge," as popular history has called him — held court in Fort Smith from 1875 to 1896, trying cases from the Indian Territory in a jurisdiction so vast and so violent that his court operated with unusual independence and unusual severity. The gallows at the Fort Smith courthouse carried out more than eighty executions during Parker's tenure, and the mythologized Western justice that his court represented became part of the city's permanent identity.
Where It Is and What People Do There Now
Fort Smith sits at the western edge of Arkansas where the Arkansas River emerges from the Ouachita Mountains through a series of gaps and begins its long eastward run to the Mississippi. The city of about 90,000 is the second-largest in Arkansas and the commercial center of a region that extends well into eastern Oklahoma. The University of Arkansas at Fort Smith serves the region's higher education needs. Manufacturing, healthcare, and the service industries that any city of this size generates provide the employment base.
The original Fort Smith site is now a National Historic Site, its restored buildings including the federal courthouse and the preserved ruins of the original fort telling the story of the garrison, the court, and the particular lawless-borderlandness of the Indian Territory frontier. The US Marshals Museum, which opened in Fort Smith, honors the marshals who served in Parker's court and in the Indian Territory — men who rode into genuinely dangerous country to serve warrants and bring defendants back to the jurisdiction of Parker's courtroom. The Arkansas River, now dammed and navigable, carries commercial barge traffic through Fort Smith and connects it to the Mississippi and the Gulf. The mountains that frame the city to the east are still there, the Ouachitas rising green and forested above the river valley.
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