Fort Smith Today, The Gateway Still

Drive the streets of Fort Smith today and the geography still makes its argument. The Arkansas River curves below the bluff where the fort once stood. The Poteau comes in from the south, same as it always has.

Oklahoma begins a few hundred yards to the west, at the bridge, where Indian Territory used to be. The city has gone through the cycles that most American industrial towns have gone through: the boom of the railroad era, the relative prosperity of the manufacturing years, the contraction that followed when factories closed and the economy reorganized itself around knowledge and services. Fort Smith lost population and industry in the second half of the twentieth century and has been working the problem of reinvention ever since.

It is the third-largest city in Arkansas, a regional center for a large swath of the Ozarks and the western Arkansas-eastern Oklahoma borderland. What has not changed is the particular character that comes from being a threshold place. Fort Smith was always a town where two legal systems met, where cultures that had been forced into proximity by American expansion conducted their commerce and their conflicts, where the promise of law and the reality of the frontier negotiated their terms.

That negotiation was often brutal. The people who bore the worst of it, the Cherokee and Choctaw and Osage who had been removed here, the enslaved and formerly enslaved people like Bass Reeves who had to find their place in a country that had not made room for them, the immigrants who came to work the mines and the docks, are now as much the story of this place as the judge, the gallows, and the legend. Fort Smith is still a gateway.

What it opens onto now is less a lawless territory than a landscape of layered history, waiting to be read by anyone who slows down long enough to look.