The Edge of Everything, Fort Smith's Founding, 1817
Near Fort Smith, Arkansas
In December of eighteen seventeen, a small column of soldiers splashed across the Arkansas River and climbed the bluff where it meets the Poteau. Major William Bradford had orders from the War Department to plant a garrison at the border between the Osage and the Cherokees, two nations that had been fighting each other in a country the United States government had decided needed watching. Bradford named the place Fort Smith, after General Thomas Adams Smith, who never actually visited the place, and set his men to cutting timber in the cold.
The location was not chosen by accident. The Arkansas River was already the spine of commerce in this part of the continent. Flatboats and keelboats had been working their way upstream from New Orleans for years, carrying salt pork, whiskey, dry goods, and the tools of settlement.
The confluence of the Arkansas and the Poteau marked the natural western limit of navigable water, which made it the natural western limit of everything else the young republic understood as civilization. What lay to the west was Indian Territory, a vast and legally complicated country that Congress had begun imagining as a permanent home for the Native nations being displaced from the eastern states. The Osage held the high plains and river bottoms to the northwest.
The Western Cherokees, forced from Tennessee and Georgia in an earlier wave of removal, had already established towns and farms along the lower Arkansas. Their boundary ran almost exactly through this bluff. Bradford's little fort lasted only until eighteen twenty-four, when the army abandoned it as redundant.
The town that had grown up around the garrison, however, stayed. Traders, ferrymen, lawyers, and speculators had already decided that a place at the edge of one world and the beginning of another was exactly the kind of place worth staying in. Fort Smith would spend the next century as precisely that: the last American town before the Territory, the hinge between two legal worlds, and the place where the consequences of both came home to roost.
