The United States Marshals Museum

There is a building on the Arkansas River levee at Fort Smith that was a long time coming. The United States Marshals Service is the oldest federal law enforcement agency in the country, established by the Judiciary Act of seventeen eighty-nine in the same legislation that created the federal court system. For most of its two-hundred-and-thirty-year history, it lacked a national museum.

The choice of Fort Smith for the museum was not arbitrary. The Western District of Arkansas under Judge Parker employed one of the largest forces of deputy marshals in the country during the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, when the population of the Indian Territory required constant legal attention and the Territory itself was too large for any smaller force to manage. Dozens of Parker's deputies died in the line of duty over his twenty-one years on the bench.

The memorial to those men, and to the marshals who have served since seventeen eighty-nine in every corner of the country, anchors the museum's interpretive mission. The Marshals Museum opened in its permanent facility in Fort Smith after years of planning and fundraising. Its collection includes original documents, weapons, badges, vehicles, and artifacts from across the full span of American federal law enforcement.

It tells the story of the institution through the men and women who carried the badge, including Bass Reeves, who is honored with a statue in Fort Smith as a recognition that the history of the Marshal's service is larger and more diverse than the mythology of the frontier West ever admitted. The museum sits a short distance from the Fort Smith National Historic Site where Parker's courtroom and the gallows have been preserved. Together the two sites make Fort Smith one of the most concentrated repositories of frontier legal history in the United States.