Fort Smith

Here's my conversation with Amber.

I'm joined by Amber Mader, who comes to us from Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Amber, thanks so much for joining me on In Your Backyard.

I'm glad to be here.

But outside of town, much of the surrounding countryside remained relatively undeveloped with scattered farmhouses and cabins connected by narrow dirt roads winding through the wooded hills.

Well, according to the legend, Sometime during the early 1850s, a young couple from Fort Smith decided to settle in this isolated part of the Ozarks, hoping to build a life together.

The two had just recently married, and rather than remaining in the community they had known, they decided to make a fresh start somewhere new.

Of course, making such a big move back then was not exactly easy.

It brought here the judicial hanging imported to colonial America for criminals, rebels, enslaved people, infamous mass judicial executions, including the 1862 public hanging of 38 Dakota men in Cotto, Minnesota, that was ordered by the United States federal government.

You know, it's been so famous that we've even had a judge who was called the hanging judge, Judge Isaac Parker in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

He famously utilized the gallows and the news as symbols of federal judicial power across the Western frontier in the late 19th century.

And then, of course, we had the end of the judicial hanging States sanctioned hangings steadily gave way to electrocution, gas chamber and lethal injection.