It Was Not a Noose Day at the Fort Smith National Historic Site

I'm pretty bummed that the Fort Smith National Historic Site no longer hangs a noose on the gallows on the anniversary of an execution. It was always kind of fun to be driving by with friends and say, "Hey, is it a noose day? Let's go see!"

In case you ever wondered what it was like to grow up me, lol!

I just like anniversaries and recreations and "on this day in history"-type stuff, but I do see how the practice was probably objectively morbid, and how the park rangers probably got a wearisome amount of inappropriately looky-loo questions and comments on every anniversary. We can't ever seem to have nice things, sigh.

Ah, well. The day we went wasn't an execution anniversary, anyway, and at least the reproduction gallows itself remains!

It was a beautiful day to not have an execution anniversary, and the sun blazed such that my poor, pale family was fraught with sweats and gasps and complaints as we browsed the local farmer's market and then the grounds of what used to be a fort and town on the border between the United States and Indian Territory.

As for me, I was growing increasingly certain that one of the underwires in my bra had broken free of its channel and was digging into my armpit, and I was not looking forward to the ordeal later of recombobulating myself in a public restroom--putting on a sweaty bra while one is also sweaty is almost as tough as putting on a wet swimsuit while one is also wet!--but did I complain?

No, because if you grow up in Arkansas, you grow up weird, poorly socialized to the wider world, and a bit uneducated in some shocking ways, but you also grow up tough!

Anyway, the history of Fort Smith is a little confusing, because it went through a few distinct phases. The first phase is after the government started throwing native nations off of their ancestral homelands and forcing them to emigrate away to encroach upon the established homelands of other nations. So the Cherokee had to encroach upon the Osage here, and this caused enough discord that the government, having bought the whole place off the French so it felt like everything that happened there, up to and including wars between nations (that, to be fair, they also did cause), was their business to stick their nose in.

So, boom! Fort!

Or rather, the footprint of a fort, I guess. This first one was abandoned in 1824.

But what a view it once had!

One of the many very special things about my youth that I did not realize were very special was growing up next to this river:

These days, there's a trail that allows you to walk or bike the entire riverfront as it borders the city, but back when I was a lonely young weirdo with a part-time minimum wage salary, a driver's license and my Pappa's old 1980 Lincoln Town Car (god, I miss that monstrosity!) to use it on, and most of the summer at my disposal, there were really only a couple of proper places in town to access the river, and this was one of them... provided that you bushwhacked your way through a ton of chigger-filled brush, crossed an active railroad track, and then bushwhacked a little more.

Tangent, but later on this day we'd be eating lunch with my high school best friend, when my older kid would mention brushing through some tall grass and weeds that morning (she's a full-grown adult and yet forever my feral wildling!). My buddy gasped and was immediately all, "Did you wash off your legs?!? You're gonna get chiggers!!!" The kid cracked up, because I had reacted the EXACT same way when it happened, and she did not understand what the big deal was.

So then for her crimes she got to sit there eating her pho and listen to my buddy and I relaying our Top Ten Worst Chigger Encounters. Mine is when I sat with my back against a tree once when I was around nine or ten and then spent the next two weeks in an agony of itching from a thousand chigger bites, only 900 of which I could reach, all down my back from neck to butt.

ANYWAY, these days you only have to battle chiggers on your way to the river if you're a feral wildling and wander deliberately off into the weeds. 

Here's my favorite spot on the river:

It's just at the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers, and this rocky shelf lets you sit and sun yourself as comfortably as if you were on a lakeshore. One benefit to the bushwhacking was that this spot was quite secluded when I was young, a fact that I made ample use of to the tune of LOTS of interpersonal mischief, but I do also like to see it so lovingly tended and clearly well enjoyed:

Anyway, a decade or so after that first fort was abandoned, this area got another fort thanks to the Indian Removal Act of 1830:

This one's also mostly a footprint. But a bigger one!

Interestingly-ish, then future president Zachary Taylor was in charge of the fort for a while in the 1840s. The commissary from that time is still standing, and is the oldest building in the city of Fort Smith:

Imagine stopping here to supply your wagon train at the commissary, because you're on your way to California--there's gold in them there hills!

Like most self-respecting American forts, this one also played a small part in the Civil War, when it was captured by the Union in 1863. I have randomly spent so much time in the Civil War this summer!

I'm personally most interested in the fort's early history, but the next part of its history is objectively the most famous: for a very specific amount of time, Fort Smith operated at the border of established colonizer settlement, and was subject to a Wild West-amount of crime and cowboy-style crime enforcement. Hence this guy:

And this guy!

Just between us, Judge Isaac Parker definitely had some autism. He was a black-and-white thinker who personally hated the death penalty but was firmly committed to executing the law of the land precisely as written, and therefore, thanks to how profoundly crime-ridden this area was, got himself the nickname "The Hanging Judge."

But first he had to get the criminals out of Indian Territory and into his courtroom. That's where this guy came in!

There are several famous U.S. Marshals of history and pop culture, depending on how interested you are in Westerns. As a kid, I watched a lot of Westerns with my Pappa, and I went through my own Zane Grey phase as a teenager (fun fact: the Fort Smith Public Library had an entire section for Westerns, they were so popular, but the books themselves were kind of notorious because they ALWAYS came back to the library absolutely reeking of cigarette smoke). Basically, the marshals tracked down suspected criminals exactly the way it's depicted in the Westerns (both versions of True Grit are partly set in Fort Smith, although sadly neither were filmed there--Pappa would have LOVED to have met John Wayne!!!)

Fort Smith has a whole entire other museum just for the marshals, so this site focuses more on the criminals, the jail, and the court:

old jail, located underneath Judge Parker's Courtroom so the smell would waft up and also make the courtroom noxious

"new" old jail, which stacked prison cells like cordwood but at least met minimum hygiene standards

Judge Parker's courtroom, destination of many, many, many public school field trips

Fun tangent: We were watching the orientation film in the visitor center--because you've ALWAYS got to watch the orientation film!--and I kept thinking, "Who is this narrator? He sounds so familiar!" So obviously I stayed to watch the credits so I could see, and of course! It was Bur Edson, newscaster for Channel 5 News for my entire childhood! Mamma and Pappa were devout local news buffs, and we watched the news at 5:00pm and 10:00pm--we did not watch the morning news, because that was when Mamma and Pappa sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and chain smoking. 

Visiting your childhood hometown is so weird.

Also, please listen to the dulcet voice of Bur Edson, former local celebrity:

This "new" old jail exhibit wasn't around yet during my five billion grade school field trips here, so it's always exciting to see displays that I haven't yet memorized:

This is a VERY noose-forward historic site!

Spotted our old friend, the clay pipe, in an exhibit of archeological finds at the fort!

Okay, so this entire brief trip actually had a purpose beyond sightseeing and visiting with old friends and mooching around my former childhood haunts. The reason for the whole trip was this:

My favorite stage director is Rachel Chavkin, and she has also, not coincidentally, directed my two favorite Broadway musicals, Hadestown and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.

So obviously when I found out that she was workshopping a musical only a nine-hour drive away, and only an hour from my childhood hometown, I grabbed anybody who couldn't hang onto the furniture hard enough, threw them into the car, and off we went. A nine-hour road trip is NOTHING if you live in the Midwest! Heck, it takes twenty minutes just to get into town!

And that's how we found ourselves having a little cocktail or two--

--then finding our seats and checking out the set--

--and then watching Eugene Onegin, a Bluegrass musical based on a Pushkin novel in verse and set in my home state of Arkansas in the 1940s:

It was wonderful.

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There Were Mastodons Under My Feet!

Red cream soda and chocolate ice cream AND fossils on the same day?!? This turned out to be a top-tier holiday!

Mastodon State Historic Site preserves the Kimmswick Bone Bed, an incompletely excavated paleontological site that contains both mastodon fossils and Clovis points, giving evidence that early humans hunted them here:

There was apparently a long history (starting in at least the 1800s!) of unscientific fossil digging at this site, and the lack of preservation was further exacerbated by the full lifespan of a rock quarry. If I understood the signage correctly, everything below the level of the bluff was excavated by the quarry--

--and if that is indeed true, then it makes me physically sick to think about, because what other countless wonders must have been hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing?

In the 1970s, the entire remaining site was almost hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing, when a state highway was being planned for that exact spot. Fortunately, a public campaign saved it and helped the Missouri Department of Natural Resources buy it, but you can see from this Google Earth screenshot how close it is to the bone bed:

The bottom right of the loop trail is an extension that goes through the former dig sites for the bone bed. It's SO close to two access roads and the highway! To the south, just off-screen, is Rock Creek, which is actually where the earliest mastodon bones were reported, having been seen weathering out of the bank. The scientist who excavated and prepared them turned them into a sideshow Voltron-esque super mastodon that he exhibited around the world and later sold to the British Natural History Museum... where it was disassembled and reassembled into a proper mastodon skeleton, lol.

The Mastodon State Historic Site Museum had so many mastodon fossils excavated from Kimmswick and the neighboring Barnhart site!

This tusk is a product of rescue paleontology conducted by volunteers on the site of a car dealership that was trying to expand. Here's a former volunteer's interesting take on that excavation:

I found a travel blogger's post about visiting this museum before the tusk was conserved, so you can see how it was previously mounted and its darker appearance.

Ugh, if I was trying to build ANYTHING, I do not care what, and I uncovered a fossil, I would stop what I was doing forever and instead spend the rest of my life grubbing in the dirt with all my brand-new fossils!

So many of my favorite things all in the same frame:

I feel like often, state park sites lose out on the best artifacts, so that the visitor centers for even the most amazing state sites are somewhat sparse. Not this place, though! Check out some of their very many Clovis points!

And then much later, we get to my favorite native peoples--the Mississippians!

This site is actually just a few miles and across the river from Cahokia, which makes me wonder what Mississippian settlements might have been right here, out in the Cahokian suburbs.

On top of the bluff, above the quarry site, there is apparently also a cool cave:

With even more cool stuff found inside it!

It doesn't seem like any of these sites have been excavated since the 1980s, which in some ways is a huge bummer because who wouldn't want more mastodon bones and Clovis points in the world? But I guess if nobody has a research question that can only be solved by excavating here, then it all might as well stay tucked safely away in its soil and caves!

Okay, one more picture of the tusk before we hike!

This shelter on the hiking trail is the historical marker for the Kimmswick Bone Bed--

--but the actual excavation sites are unmarked and fully grown over. Here's where they're supposed to be:

The hiking trail basically follows the edge of the Possible Distribution of Clovis Age Sediments from the northeast down and then west to about the near edge of the Concrete Foundation of Lime Kiln. So hiking back, basically everything to the right of the trail is assorted old dig sites, and everything to the left of the trail is potential Clovis evidence.

Sounds interesting, but it actually all looks like this, lol:

But hey, that just means that mastodons and Clovis points could be ANYWHERE. They were probably right there under our feet sometimes!

Here's me with definitely a mastodon skeleton with a Clovis point sticking into it right there under my feet:

Afterward, we did everyone's least favorite thing to do when they're hot and sweaty and grubby and tired--we got back in the car and drove for another five hours, sigh.

But at least we had plenty of Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas wildlife to entertain us:

Only one of the several alarming bumper stickers is legible in this photo, but I assure you that they were all nasty.

Next up: an old fort and a new musical!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!