Hidden History of Fort Smith, Arkansas

Hidden History of Fort Smith, Arkansas PDF Author: Ben Boulden
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1614234671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
During the days of American westward expansion Fort Smith was the gritty frontier town whose lawless reputation became known both east and west of the Mississippi. Dubbed "Hell on the Border," the last developed township just before unsettled native territory, Fort Smith laid low more than its fair share of settlers, pioneers, and outlaws alike. Yet after years of disorder, reformers and lawmen helped tame the city's wild ways, beginning Fort Smith's transformation into the prosperous city it is today. Yet buried beneath Fort Smith's infamous past are forgotten stories, untold tales, and little known facts concealed just below the city's historical surface. After years spent researching the city's history for his historical column in the Times Record, journalist Ben Boulden uncovers Fort Smith's hidden history.

Hidden History of Fort Smith, Arkansas

Hidden History of Fort Smith, Arkansas PDF Author: Ben Boulden
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1614234671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
During the days of American westward expansion Fort Smith was the gritty frontier town whose lawless reputation became known both east and west of the Mississippi. Dubbed "Hell on the Border," the last developed township just before unsettled native territory, Fort Smith laid low more than its fair share of settlers, pioneers, and outlaws alike. Yet after years of disorder, reformers and lawmen helped tame the city's wild ways, beginning Fort Smith's transformation into the prosperous city it is today. Yet buried beneath Fort Smith's infamous past are forgotten stories, untold tales, and little known facts concealed just below the city's historical surface. After years spent researching the city's history for his historical column in the Times Record, journalist Ben Boulden uncovers Fort Smith's hidden history.

Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves

Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves PDF Author: Sidney Thompson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149622020X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an origin story in the true American tradition. Before Bass Reeves could stake his claim as the most successful nineteenth-century American lawman, arresting more outlaws than any other deputy during his thirty-two-year career as a deputy U.S. marshal in some of the most dangerous regions of the Wild West, he was a slave. After a childhood picking cotton, he became an expert marksman under his master’s tutelage, winning shooting contests throughout the region. His skill had serious implications, however, as the Civil War broke out. Reeves was given to his master’s mercurial, sadistic, Moby-Dick-quoting son in the hopes that Reeves would keep him safe in battle. The ensuing humiliation, love, heroics, war, mind games, and fear solidified Reeves’s determination to gain his freedom and drew him one step further on his fated path to an illustrious career. Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an important historical work that places Reeves in the pantheon of American heroes and a thrilling historical novel that narrates a great man’s exploits amid the near-mythic world of the nineteenth-century frontier.

Secret History of the Wild, Wild West

Secret History of the Wild, Wild West PDF Author: Daniel J. Duke
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644112302
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
• Offers evidence from Jesse James’s secret encoded diaries • Examines Jesse James’s close ties with other notorious outlaws, such as Johnny Ringo, Jesse Evans, and Billy the Kid • Shows how Jesse James was related, by blood or marriage, to powerful people in law enforcement and politics, including the elite families behind the Copperheads and the Knights of the Golden Circle organizations Jesse James and many other Old West outlaws were much more than just wild cowboys. As author Daniel Duke--the great-great-grandson of Jesse James--reveals, Jesse James and other infamous outlaws were part of a larger organization, centuries old, that has affected U.S. history from the small, rural streets of early America to the highest levels of the nation’s government, with continuing influence to this day. Drawing on his great-great-grandfather’s secret diaries, Duke unravels the hidden history of the Wild West to expose the outlaws, politicians, and secret societies who were pulling strings behind the scenes. He examines Jesse James’s close ties with other notorious outlaws, such as Johnny Ringo, Jesse Evans, and Billy the Kid, and demonstrates not only how Jesse James faked his own death and lived out his life under an alias, but how Billy the Kid did the same. He also details how both Jesse James and Billy the Kid continued their work for the nameless organization after their faked deaths. Exploring how Jesse James was related, by blood or marriage, to powerful people in law enforcement and politics, Duke details Jesse’s connections to the Baylor family, who founded Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and other elite families who were instrumental in founding and leading the Copperheads and the Knights of the Golden Circle organizations before, during, and after the Civil War. The author shows how Jesse James was connected to former U.S. presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and Harry S. Truman as well as President Johnson’s man in the shadows, Texas mob figure Billie Sol Estes. Exposing the secret agenda behind the outlaw gangs of the Wild West, Duke also reveals the stealthy war between the secret organization and its opposition that has been waged in the shadows for centuries.

The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas

The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas PDF Author: Kenneth C. Barnes
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 168226159X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Winner, 2022 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award, Arkansas Historical Association The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development. Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision. By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas’s Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan’s early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.

Garrison Avenue

Garrison Avenue PDF Author: Joyce Faulkner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943267651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the 1910s was no longer a rough western town. Electric lights, fancy hotels, new theaters, trolleys, and automobiles were changing how people traveled, did business, worshiped and enjoyed themselves. Citizens viewed it as a modern city where life was "worth living." Until the night of March 23, 1912 when violence overtook Garrison Avenue--beginning with the shooting of a popular lawman, Andy Carr, and ending with the lynching of an innocent young black man, Sanford Lewis.

The Meat Racket

The Meat Racket PDF Author: Christopher Leonard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145164583X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"In The Meat Racket, investigative reporter Christopher Leonard delivers the first-ever account of how a handful of companies have seized the nation's meat supply. He shows how they built a system that puts farmers on the edge of bankruptcy, charges high prices to consumers, and returns the industry to the shape it had in the 1900s before the meat monopolists were broken up. At the dawn of the 21st century, the greatest capitalist country in the world has an oligarchy controlling much of the food we eat and a high-tech sharecropping system to make that possible. These companies are even able to raise meat prices for consumers while pushing down the price they pay to farmers. We know that it takes big companies to bring meat to the American table. What The Meat Racket shows is that this industrial system is rigged against all of us." -- From publisher description.

Arkansas in Ink

Arkansas in Ink PDF Author: Guy Lancaster
Publisher: Butler Center Books
ISBN: 1935106740
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In 1837 Representative Joseph J. Anthony stabs the speaker of the house to death during a debate about wolf pelts. In 1899 Hot Springs police shoot it out with the county sheriffs over control of illegal gambling. In 1974 President Richard Nixon resigns in part due to the outspokenness of Pine Bluff native Martha Mitchell. In this special print project of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, legendary cartoonist Ron Wolfe brings these and many other stories to life. Accompanied by selected entries from the encyclopedia, Wolfe’s cartoons highlight the oddities and absurdities of our state’s history. Seriously, you couldn’t make up this stuff.

Arkansas

Arkansas PDF Author: Best Books on
Publisher: Best Books on
ISBN: 1623760046
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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Book Description
compiled by workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Arkansas ; with a new introduction by Elliott West. 1st pbk. ed.

Fort Smith, Little Gibraltar on the Arkansas

Fort Smith, Little Gibraltar on the Arkansas PDF Author: Edwin C. Bearss
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806112329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
No history of the West is complete without the story of Fort Smith, the fort that “refused to die.” Established in 1817, Fort Smith was repeatedly abandoned and reoccupied during the following fifty years, eventually becoming the mother post of the Southwest. The original fort was installed on the Arkansas River by Major William Bradford and a company of the Rifles Regiment. Bradford's mission was to stop a bloody war between the Osages and the Cherokees, a conflict discouraging the emigration of eastern Indians to the lands west of the Mississippi and thereby interfering with the government's removal policy. During the Civil War, Confederate armies at Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, and Prairie Grove were supplied from Fort Smith, and the Rebel force that crushed Opothleyoholo's band marched from Fort Smith. The fort was taken by Federal troops in September 1863 and served as a Union base for the remainder of the Civil War. In 1871 the army again abandoned the fort, but the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas soon moved in. Under Judge Isaac Parker, the renowned “Hanging Judge of Fort Smith,” the court became a force for law and order in much of Indian Territory.

True Grit

True Grit PDF Author: Charles Portis
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1590206509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
#1 New York Times bestseller “An epic and a legend” —Washington Post “Quite simply, an American masterpiece.” —Boston Globe “The dialogue in True Grit is exquisite.” —David Mamet “Charles Portis had a wonderful talent—original, quirky, exciting.” —Larry McMurtry Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s most enduring and incomparable literary voices, and his novels have left an indelible mark on the American canon. True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and has garnered critical acclaim as well as enthusiastic praise from countless passionate fans for more than fifty years. This story of danger and adventure in the old west became the basis for two award-winning films, the first starring John Wayne, in his only Oscar-winning role, as Marshall Rooster Cogburn, and the widely praised remake by the Coen brothers, starring Jeff Bridges. True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 cash. Filled with an unwavering urge to avenge her father’s blood, Mattie finds and, after some tenacious finagling, enlists one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available US Marshal, as her partner in pursuit, and they head off into Indian Territory after the killer. True Grit is essential reading. Not just a classic Western, but an undeniable classic of American literature as eccentric, cool, funny, and unflinching as Mattie Ross herself. For fans of either the John Wayne classic or the more recent Coen brothers’ movie, it’s a chance to relive the story of Mattie and Rooster and experience their story as it was originally told. For fans of taut, funny storytelling, it will be a joy to experience in its original form. This edition includes an afterword by bestselling author Donna Tartt (The Secret History and The Goldfinch) and a reading group guide.