Heroes & Outlaws

It’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.

But let’s go back to the very beginning when the settlement was little more than a rocky point above a wide, muddy river. Situated at the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers, Fort Smith would become a most important frontier fort. It was first established as an outpost in 1817 when Major William Bradford and his command of 64 men put ashore on the rock landing below Belle Point. One of Bradford's duties 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 headquarters at Belle Fontaine. On hearing that Bradford was on his way, Long left his plans for the first fort along with a small detail of men and went on his exploratory way.

Hostilities that began in 1808 between the native Osage tribe and the foreign latecomers, the Cherokee, would eventually lead to Bradford’s heroic actions. A delegation of Cherokee chiefs from East Tennessee had visited then-President Thomas Jefferson and asked that he allow members of their tribe to live as hunters and emigrate to the lands west of the Mississippi River. At this time the Osage claimed all the land west of the Mississippi between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. So this move could cause a war between those tribes. Yet, on January 9, 1809, President Jefferson authorized the requested move. Within a few years, a few thousand Cherokees had settled on the Arkansas and White Rivers in Arkansas. An emigration that occurred a good thirty years prior to the Trail of Tears that would herd thousands of more Cherokees out of their homelands and into Indian Territory to the west of Arkansas.

An imaginary boundary, drawn by United States Commissioners, did little to keep the warring Indians apart. Constant friction caused killings, the stealing of horses and just about any aggressive behavior the Indians could come up with. The Treaty of Hiwassee of July 8, 1817, added more friction and gave the Cherokees as much land in Arkansas as they had relinquished in the Appalachian region. By then around 2,000 Cherokees lived in settlements on the Arkansas. By 1819, 3,500 to 6,000 lived there.

So then arrived Major Bradford and his company of Rifles to establish Fort Smith at Belle Point. Bradford had been ordered to do everything possible to keep the peace between the hostile tribes. What he did could not be imagined by his superiors or the warring tribes. Immediately he called a meeting of the leaders of the Shawnee, Delaware, Chickasaw, and the Choctaw bands that had sided with the Cherokees. Bradford also counseled the Quapaws and the Cherokees to live in peace.

But these weren't all the hostiles Bradford was forced to deal with. Trouble-making white outlaws, hearing of the wilderness settlement with little law enforcement filtered into the territory and added their violent behavior to the mix. In addition, frontier families squatted on Indian lands stirring up yet more trouble.

Faced with non-existent communication with Washington—it took up to three months or more for a message to reach Washington—decisions were left up to Bradford. As Indian wars flamed, he could only rely on his small company of blue and greyclad Rifles and two six-pound cannons to handle the situations. Besides this, he had to keep a work detail to plant corn and tend to a garrison vegetable garden. Because Congress had decided to be more frugal in army spending, most all of his supplies had to come from the soil. Hunting details also brought in wild game killed near the fort which gave the native Indians even more excuses to go on the warpath. To add to his problems were diseases known as the ague and bilious fever. During the summer of 1819, 100 Cherokees succumbed.

While Bradford was away a few Osage leaders, led by Bad Tempered Buffalo, and some 400 braves threatened the fort. Left in charge, Lt. Scott managed to hold down the uprising with just two cannon. By the time Bradford returned, it was rumored that over 1500 Osage warriors had amassed on the White River to take over the Cherokees' land. Bradford sent word this would not be tolerated. Then in a bold move, he warned the chiefs that if they shed one single drop of a white man's blood, he would exterminate their nations. He said he would not write Washington for advice or permission, but would simply report that there was not a Cherokee or Osage alive on his side of the Mississippi.

Bradford continued to work tirelessly to maintain an uneasy peace between the hostile tribes. At the end of his tour of duty in February, 1822, not one of his men had been killed by an Indian, and as far as was recorded, not one of his men had so much as fired a shot at one.

A new era began at Fort Smith with the arrival of Colonel Matthew Arbuckle who was convinced that the time was ripe to bring the Cherokees and the Osages together and restore a permanent peace on the Arkansas frontier. This could and did take a long while, but that’s yet another story for another time.

—Velda Brotherton is an award-winning nonfiction author, novelist, and a founding partner of Saddlebag Dispatches. She lives on a mountainside in Winslow, Arkansas, where she writes everyday and talks at length with her cat.

An 1958 engraving showing Fort Smith and Belle Point and the Arkansas River from the Oklahoma side, created under the direction of the U.S. Secretary of War.