14
saddlebag dispatches
I
was to prevent the Indians from continuing hostilities with each other. He and his small troop would face thousands of Indians fighting each other. They would not hesitate to face down a few white men in uniforms. Due to the remote location, the tiny army was pretty much on its own. They were to erect a post on the Arkansas near the point where the Osage boundary struck the river. The first few rude shelters built there by Major Stephen Long of the Topographical Engineers, before Bradford's arrival, were designated as Camp Smith in honor of General Thomas Smith, commander of the 9th Military Department with headquarSITUATED AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE ARKANSAS AND ters at Belle Fontaine. On hearing that Bradford was on POTEAU RIVERS, FORT SMITH WOULD BECOME ANIMPORTANT his way, Long left his plans FRONTIER FORT. IT WAS FIRST ESTABLISHED AS AN OUTPOST for the first fort along with a IN 1817 WHEN MAJOR WILLIAM BRADFORD AND HIS COMMAND small detail of men and went PUT ASHORE ON THE ROCK LANDING BELOW BELLE POINT. on his exploratory way. Hostilities that began in 1808 between the native But let’s go back to the very beginning when the Osage tribe and the foreign latecomers, the Cherokee, would eventually lead to Bradford’s heroic actions. A settlement was little more than a rocky point above a wide, muddy river. Situated at the confluence of the delegation of Cherokee chiefs from East Tennessee had visited then-President Thomas Jefferson and asked Arkansas and Poteau rivers, Fort Smith would become a most important frontier fort. It was first established that he allow members of their tribe to live as hunters and emigrate to the lands west of the Mississippi as an outpost in 1817 when Major William Bradford and his command of 64 men put ashore on the rock River. At this time the Osage claimed all the land west landing below Belle Point. One of Bradford's duties of the Mississippi between the Missouri and Arkansas t’s difficult to believe that the peaceful town of Ft. Smith, Arkansas was once about as wild as the west could get. Its wide streets and quiet outlying neighborhoods are far removed from those days when gunplay was a regular event and ladies of the evening openly plied their trade. Hard to imagine Ft. Smith as a gateway to the wildest of the wild west. Indian Territory lay just across the Arkansas River. A haven for the worst of the worst, it would one day take Judge Isaac Parker, the man known as "The Hanging Judge," to tame things down.
