CHILDREN PLAY WHERE MEN WERE HANGED
By Alvin Rucker
Part 3
Old Corridors of Judge Parker's Jail, Which the United States Senate Was Told Was a Shambles and Butchers' Domain, Resounds With the Happy Laughter, Childish Play. The Remodeled Building Is Used as Headquarters for the Fort Smith Welfare Association
The United States versus Peter House, charged with bigamy,” called out Judge Isaac Charles Parker, and judge of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Arkansas having criminal jurisdiction over Oklahoma.
A bigamy case was nothing to excite even passing interest, in the famous Federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, during the days when the bottle and Bible were contending for supremacy in Oklahoma. The court bailiff disappeared into the jail basement where more than 100 murderers were confined, awaiting trial or execution.
Lawyers with more serious cases to claim their attention took advantage of the opportunity to make last-minute preparations for trials.
The austere Judge Parker, who during his 21 years on the Federal court bench at Fort Smith, Arkansas, sentenced to hundred and 72 men to die on the scaffold, and who hanged 88 of them, adjusted his spectacles and centered attention upon the court docket or replete with the names of terrorist.
A weazen-faced man with ratty eyes was led, manacled, to the bar of justice, Judge Parker looked up. "Who is that?" He asked of the bailiff? “Lee Galcatcher, charged with bigamy,” the bailiff replied. “Take him back,” said he judge. “He’s not the man. This is a bigamy case all right, but that man never caught a gal in his life.
‘He’s too ugly to catch anything.” Judge was right. The bailiff through an error had brought up the wrong man.
An aged Irishman, charged with selling whiskey in the territory, was arraigned before Judge Parker. "I have yer honor, and may I plade the own case?" Inquired the son of Erin. "Certainly," replied the judge. "Then I plade guilty," said Pat--a plea that caused the judge to laugh and Pat drew for himself the lowest sentence that the court could fix.
A witness had testified to the angelic character of the defendant. The prosecution, on cross-examination, sought to lay the predicate for impeaching the witness’s testimony.
"Now, as a matter of fact don't you know that this defendant is quarrelsome and frequently has trouble with his neighbors?" Asked the prosecutor of the witness.
“Yes,” was the reply.
“Don’t you know that he gets drunk, whips his wife, and that he was arrested not long ago for beating a small boy nearly to death, and that he gets in jail nearly every time he goes town?"
“Yes, that is true,” replied the witness.
“And yet you, knowing that all of that is true of about this defendant, swear that his reputation is good in his community?"
“Yes I do. It takes more than that to give a man a bad reputation up where I live,” replied the witness.
A smile started across Judge Parker's stern face, but it disappeared in judicial seriousness, as he sternly remarked, "that indicates the class of characters this court has to contend with."
From the inky darkness that enveloped the great gallows floated an unearthly sound, one night--a sound so weird and expressive of poignant grief that the deputy marshals in the jail office were startled into silence for an instant. Cautiously the officers stepped into the jail yard: “The gallows stood in an isolated place, about 300 yd. from the jail building. Still, the moaning continued. "It's a ghost, beyond question," volunteered one of the deputies. A call for volunteers to go to the gallows and investigate the unusual sound met with no response from the other deputies, and the one who did the suggesting went alone. On the floor of the gallows he found a man in a highly panic condition, in this by liquor, and that was the source of the weird sounds.
Maintenance on the Arkansas side of the boundary line, of a court, the criminal jurisdiction of which was wholly in Oklahoma, except for a crime that might be committed on government owned property, was due to the fact that for many years there was no suitable place for holding court on the Oklahoma side of the line. When the court was created, March 3, 1851, no such political subdivision existed in Indian Territory.
The area over which the court had criminal jurisdiction was legally described as "the Indian country" and embraced all of what is now Oklahoma (the Panhandle excepted) until after Judge Parker had been on the bench 10 years, when the western half of the area was completely detached from his jurisdiction. During the next 10 years of Judge Parker's tenure, the remaining area received the legal reference of Indian Territory, instead of the Indian country. Part of Oklahoma, even today, thick stands within the corporate limits of Fort Smith, Arkansas, statutory law and presidential fiat conferring upon Fort Smith, police supervision. One of the old Fort barracks, built of stone in 1839 is still standing in about 40 ft. of the building is on the Oklahoma side of the nearby an initial point monument which the surveyors erected to mark the boundary line. The historic stone's structure in the land on which it stand is claimed by the descendents of Campbell LeFlore, it is said, one of whom he is Louis LeFlore well-known Oklahoma.
Campbell LeFlore was a prominent attorney during the early days of the Fort Smith federal court.
There are two Fort building eras at Fort Smith, one beginning in 1816 and the other in 1839. No relic remains of the 1816 era, and only the barrack building in the commissary building in which Judge Parker maintained his court chamber, remain of the 1839 era. The old, commissary building is now used as a historical Museum.
The original federal jail at Fort Smith was a log house. It later gave way to a combination courthouse and jail built of brick, still standing, and that structure is now referred to as "the old jail." It was in that structure that Cherokee Bill while awaiting execution undertook to shoot his way out and succeeded in killing Laurence Keating, jail guard, before being persuaded by Henry start to surrender his revolver which he had mysteriously acquired and concealed in his cell.
It was that structure which Senator George Vest, on the floor the United States Senate, characterized as a shambles and butchers domain, and the basement of which housed 59 men at one time awaiting hanging.
The building is now used as headquarters for the Fort Smith welfare Association, and happy boys and girls romp through its rooms. The gruesome gallows, which had a capacity of simultaneously launching 12 souls into eternity, was torn down and buried by order of the city Council shortly after Judge Parker's death, and the walks of the old fort were dismantled at that time by order of Congress.
The gallows was never taxed to its capacity, but on two occasions six men were hanged simultaneously; on three occasions five were hanged together; on three of occasions four were hanged together, and single and double executions were so numerous that street urchins, hearing the noise made by the cumbersome apparatus were went to shout. "There goes another man to hell with his boots on." George Maledon, prince of hangman, who pulled the lever that lynched 60 of the 88 men into eternity, cracked beneath the strain and returned to a farm.
During his service he apparently considered himself efficient for he often remarked that none of those who he hanged ever returned to have the job done over. In addition to those whom he hanged, Maledon shot five prisoners, two of whom died, during attendance at jail breaks.
Most of the killings, which in turn fed the gallows at Fort Smith, were of the sordid type. The victims were usually lone travelers in the sparsely settled country, and nearly invariably whiskey entered as an element.
Of the professional bandits who in those days infested what is now Oklahoma, the Dalton Brothers, Henry Starr, Belle Starr rose above the level of willful killers. Graton and Bob Dalton had been deputy United States marshals in the Fort Smith, Wichita and Muskogee federal court. Henry Starr was a professional bank robber, but he was not a "killer." Notwithstanding he was twice sentenced to be hanged for the killing of Floyd Wilson, a railroad detective. Starr killed Wilson in an open dual after he had been fired upon, and it was that mitigating circumstance that caused United States Supreme Court to twice reverse his death sentence. On his dying bed in Harrison, Arkansas, in February 1921 after Starr had been fatally shot while robbing the Peoples State Bank, he boasted that throughout his long career as a bank robber he had studiously avoided killing. Belle Starr alone, falls within romantic conception and she was a hangover from civil war days. She was the daughter of wealthy Carthage, Missouri citizens; well educated a musician and lover of books. If the Civil War had not occurred she would have spent her years in the cultured walk of life in which she was born in educated
Starr was a victim of the circumstances of war. The bond of sympathy between her and Jesse James and the Youngers, fellow products of the Civil War, was manifested when she sheltered James in her mountain rendezvous, in what is now Muskogee County, which she named Younger’s Bend. The love of horseback riding, which she acquired while scouting for the Confederate forces in her girlhood days is reflected by the image of her favorite horse chiseled on the headstone at the head of her grave. She is buried in Younger' s Bend, near the spot where she was killed by an assassin, whose identity was never established. The superstructure of her grave is a rock tomb that has withstood the erosion of 30 years and appears as though it will last indefinitely.
Cherokee Bill was a mixture of three races, the Negro predominating. He apparently killed principally for the love of shedding blood, and the business of his bloody career like that of his white companion, Bill Cook, shows that he was more dangerous than intelligent.
Rufus Buck and his gang did not rise to the level of bandits. They were simply ravishers who flourished 14 days, and surrendered without a wound after one battle with Morton Rutherford’s posse of Indians and whites. An aged member of the posse, after challenging his fellow members to join him in a charge on the besieged ravisherrs, fired one dynamite cartridge and the gang that capitulated.
On March 1, 1895, Congress passed the final act, which stripped Judge Parker of his last or remnant of authority and jurisdiction over what is now Oklahoma, and fixed September 1, 1896, as the date when the statute would become certified. August 5, 1895, Judge Parker delivered his last famous grand jury charge, and it was his valedictory. In the charge, he reviewed the history of his court, and defended the wholesale executions that he and his juries had ordered. He pointed out that there was no mob violence in his district, so certain were citizens that the court would do its duty. Every utterance, and his lengthy grand jury charged, shows how keenly he felt the stripping of authority. He said:
"We have to contend with the whole Earth--the criminal, at least, of all the country. It has been the custom for all these years that when a man committed a crime in another state, or in any state, and he could get away from the officers, he would run to the Indian country. He became a refugee criminal. And while there are many good men, hundreds and thousands of the white men in that country who are properly in there, who are there by invitation, there are hundreds of thousands of others who are stained with crime, whose tendencies are corrupted by the crimes that they have committed elsewhere, and it is with this corrupt element assembled from all the states of this union this court, has had to tend. It is why the volume has been great. That is why it has been said: ‘you must be cruel, you must be harsh, and you must be tyrannical."
Often lawyers who would have cases, whose clients' neck was placed in the halter by the evidence in the law of the case, to vindicate themselves with their clients, would go and damn the court and talk about its cruelties, and its inhumanity and wickedness in that direction. There is where it started from; there is the origin of it. Many have acted outrageously in that particular, disgracefully, unprofessionally, and in many other ways that ought to be reprimanded. This is the truth about it. There is where it started. But let the record of the courts speak for itself and it will vindicate itself.
The juries in this court, under the guidance of the court, as a rule, have endeavored to uphold the law, to vindicate it.
Now then, it is not only your duty to continue to do this for the sake of giving protection to those people under the law, but you, as well as the petted jury, are for the time being educators. You are to teach the people, everywhere, a wholesome lesson, and that is, that they must rely upon the law and upon its enforcement, for their protection, and not upon mob violence, not up on that spirit that causes people to degenerate into a mob and become criminals themselves in an effort to seek protection."
There is a prevalence of this crime everywhere, that man, instead of arresting criminals, and bringing them before juries of the country, take them out and put them to death without judge or jury, and without investigating their cases, and not being competent to properly investigate them. Every day they do that. Sometimes you will find the good men are involved in things of that kind. It is because they have lost confidence in courts and juries. You say to a community that as sure as a crime is committed, so sure will the party who has committed it be brought to merited justice, as the law prescribes that punishment, and you won't find any mob in that community.
“There are no moles in the counties of this state which are in this jurisdiction. Have you noticed that? Why is that?
It may not be that this court is entitled to the credit of it, but it is a fact that three or four times a year 60 or 75 men come up here, assist in the enforcement of the law, and they go home as educators among their people, who are in favor of depending on the wall for the protection of every right. The consequence is that the mob violence does not exist in the counties. Everything is peaceable. It is quiet.
"In 1871, when the court was removed from Van Buren to this place, the same power of protecting remained in the hands of the people of Arkansas, and I want to say that for 20 years, just about now, since the opening of the first court here, as a rule these people have preformed that duty faithfully and well. Why a distrust has been entertained of them, or why the jurisdiction was changed, I am not prepared to say, nor is it material that anything should be said upon the subject. All I have to say upon the subject is that the jurisdiction yet remains: it still is in your hands and as long as it does remain I asked you to vindicate character established by the people of this state for enforcing the law and that country. Much has been said in that regard. Much has been falsely asserted in regard to it. I can say in vindication of these jurors and of the people, that the law has been at least as well and forced by them as affecting that country and the rights of its people, as it is enforced in any state of the Union, anywhere. I can say more than that, I can say that there has not been a band of robbers or highway man or assassins in the Indian country that has not in, by the officers of this court and by the jury's passing upon their cases and finding them guilty, if they were guilty, more promptly broken up, destroyed and wiped out, then has been the case in the Indian country for 20 years past. This is the truth.
"More cases of criminals committing high crimes have been tried, a higher percentage of arrests have been made, more convictions have been obtained, although Justice has often failed from corrupt influences, as it does everywhere, from in proper influences exerted, not always felt, known and understood by the jury when the mistake is made; but, I say, notwithstanding this, there has altogether, been a greater percentage of convictions, more men brought to justice, the law better vindicated, better up hailed in better sustained, and the rights of the people better protected by the people who come to this court as jurors than in any court in the country. I care not whether it in the old states or in the new states. And when the history of this court comes to be written; when the passions of the hour, prompted by cupidity, avarice and self interest, and desire for gain shall have all disappeared, those who have been connected with it in upholding the Majesty, power and dignity of the law of United States shall not suffer from that true history."
On July 10, 1896, less than three months before the date set for the passing of Indian Territory of authority from Judge Parker's court to the newly created competitive courts with the and what is now Oklahoma, Congress adopted a resolution declaring it to be the duty of United States to establish a government and the Indian Territory which would rectify the many inequalities, irregularities and discriminations. The resolution was the prelude to the Curtis Act, which became a law June 26, 1898. The Curtis Act; just as thoroughly stripped the Oklahoma Indians of what remaining power they possessed in regulating their affairs, as other congressional measures had stripped Judge Parker's court of jurisdiction over the Indian country.
Senator Curtis is a living monument marking the close of the old epic and Oklahoma, and the beginning of the epic now prevailing, so far as the "Indian Country" is effected. With the passage of the Curtis Act, the Indian country, over which Judge Parker ruled with an iron hand for 21 years, ceased to exist.
Eight years after the passage of the Curtis Act the last remnant of the once great "Indian Country" described by the "Intercourse act" of June 30, 1834, had faded from the map, under the name of "The State of Oklahoma."
Extracted from the Alvin Rucker files of Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma