Hang Them All

Federal judges, free from local politics, (and you certainly won’t find one like that in Kansas City, Missouri) were especially influential in making courts effective on the frontier. Outstanding was Isaac Charles Parker, known as the Hanging Judge. His court at Fort Smith Arkansas, had jurisdiction over the wild Indian Territory, where outlaws of several races terrorized large sections of country, robbing and killing with little concern for the law. Ohio-born Parker had been a Missouri judge and congressman. When he assumed his duties at Fort Smith in 1875, he was, at thirty-six, the youngest man on the federal bench. He took his new duties seriously. In his first court term, he tried ninety-one criminals. Of eighteen murder cases, fifteen ended in conviction. Of eight killers sentenced to be hanged, one was killed while trying to escape and another had his sentence commuted to life in prison, and the other six were hanged in public on September 3, as several thousand watched. Most people approved of the new judge. “The certainty of punishment is the only sure prevention of crime,” said Fort Smith’s Western Independent, “and the administration of the laws by Judge Parker has made him a terror to all evildoers in the Indian country.” During the twenty-one years in which he presided over the court, Judge Parker lost sixty-five deputy marshals, killed while trying to perform their duties. He tried more than thirteen thousand crimes that carried the death penalty; he sentenced 172 to be hanged. Some escaped the noose by dying in jail or by obtaining commutation or presidential reprieve, but 88 swung from the gallows outside of his jail. By the time of Judge Parker’s death, late in 1896, most of the West had been tamed. Feuds, range wars and vigilante hangings were less common. Such primitive means of attaining justice had given way to the application of statutory law through the courts. Except for sporadic outbreaks, the West had become almost as law-abiding as the rest of the country.