Our Arklahoma Heritage: Carroll County vet, attorney, and legislator served as jail overseer under Issac C. Parker
In the summer of 1928, an 87-year-old lawyer in Harrison suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. On the morning of December 4 he died at the home of his stepdaughter, Lulu Vance Scott, after months of lingering illness.
Obituaries in northwest Arkansas papers and as far away as the St. Louis Globe-Democrat remembered him simply as a Confederate officer, a one -term legislator, a longtime attorney, and a former United States marshal. He had continued practicing law until only a few months before the end.
George James Crump was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Harrison, in Block 27, Lot 2, Space 5, near his wife and children.
He had been born on June 13, 1841, in Harlan County, Kentucky, into a family already steeped in the law. His father, John Gray Crump, originally from the Peaks of Otter region of Bedford County, Virginia, served for years as clerk of both the county and circuit courts, certifying Revolutionary War pension files and handling land disputes.
His mother, Elizabeth Gaither Watkins Crump, had come from Rowan County, North Carolina. Young George grew up among the papers, litigants, and attorneys of a small mountain courthouse. Around 1854 the family left Kentucky for a farm in the Crooked Creek Valley of Carroll County, Arkansas.
His father farmed and practiced law in the old county seat of Carrollton; George attended private school there until the war interrupted everything.
In the summer of 1861 he joined a short-lived local home-guard company as a fifth sergeant. That fall, on October 19 at Carrollton, he enlisted as a private in Company E of the 16th Arkansas Infantry. The regiment, drawn largely from the northwest counties, moved into the Western Theater. Crump rose quickly: sergeant by December, first sergeant the following spring, and junior second lieutenant in Company H by late June 1862.
He fought at Oak Hills (Wilson’s Creek), Farmington, Iuka, and Corinth. Captured at Corinth on October 6, 1862, he took the parole oath not to bear arms against the United States, then promptly rejoined his unit.
The following year, during the long siege of Port Hudson, he was captured again. After the surrender, a group of Arkansas officers--including Lieutenant G. J. Crump--were placed aboard a Union transport bound for prison.
Rather than accept captivity, several jumped overboard and swam for the shore. Fay Hempstead’s Pictorial History of Arkansas lists Crump among those who made it. Official compiled service records grow thin after mid-1863; later claims that he commanded at Jenkins’ Ferry or finished the war as a lieutenant colonel appear to mix wartime service with the rank he later held in the state militia. By the end of the fighting he is most often described as a captain. His name appears on the Confederate memorial at the Boone County Courthouse.
In October 1866, back in Carroll County, he married Josephine Bonaparte Wright Greenlee, a widow from Tennessee who already had a young daughter. She would become a poet and writer whose journals, Civil War reminiscences, short stories, and accounts of travel with her husband survive in the University of Arkansas Special Collections.
They had children together, among them Mintie Helen, who married a Garvin; Archibald McKennon Crump, who followed his father into the law and later assisted in the prosecution of the 1912 Ella Barham murder case; and George J. Crump Jr. Josephine died in 1921 and was buried at Rose Hill.
Crump served as clerk of Carroll County in the immediate postwar years until Reconstruction politics removed him. He studied law, was admitted to the Arkansas bar in 1869, and opened a practice in Carrollton. In 1873 he moved to the newer town of Harrison and established a firm that continued, in various partnerships, for the rest of his life.
He was elected as a Democrat to the Arkansas House of Representatives and served one term, 1871–1873. When the Brooks-Baxter War erupted in 1874 over the governorship, he received a commission as lieutenant colonel in the state militia; the title “Colonel” stayed with him for the rest of his life. A letter he wrote that April suggests he supported Elisha Baxter’s side. He later served on the board of trustees of the Arkansas Industrial University (the future University of Arkansas) and advocated, unsuccessfully, for a college in Harrison.
His most widely remembered public role came late. Appointed by President Grover Cleveland, he served as United States marshal for the Western District of Arkansas from April 1893 until June 1897.
The district included the Indian Territory and the federal court at Fort Smith presided over by Judge Isaac C. Parker. Crump oversaw the jail that reporters and later writers called “Hell on the Border,” supervised the deputy marshals who rode into the Territory, and carried out the sentences the court imposed.
He supervised the execution of twelve
men, among them the notorious Cherokee Bill (Crawford Goldsby) in 1896, when crowds and the risk of rescue required heavy security. His office helped capture members of the Cook
Gang and arranged the secure transport of dozens of convicted bank and train robbers to the federal prison in Detroit. During his tenure, federal reports noted efforts to improve conditions in the jail, including separate space for female prisoners. Josephine’s journal records journeys with him escorting prisoners and a visit to Washington.
Later appointments were shorter and more political. In 1901 Governor Jeff Davis named him to the board of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition for the St. Louis World’s Fair; the following year Davis removed him and replaced him with a political ally. In 1903 Crump became general attorney for the St. Louis and North Arkansas Railroad. In 1917–1918 he served as a Democratic delegate from the Third Congressional District to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention before resigning because of a family member’s illness.
In 1922, at eighty-one, he sought the Democratic nomination for the state Senate in the Third District. What began as an apparently uncontested race turned bitter when Roy W. Milum entered and accused him of blackmail; Crump answered in print. Milum won narrowly. Even then Crump remained active in his Harrison law practice.
He was remembered as an excellent marksman who, according to one newspaper, could “rip a squirrel’s eye at 40 yards, two times out of three.” The man who had escaped a Union transport by swimming the Mississippi, who had kept order in the Fort Smith jail under Parker, and who had practiced law for more than half a century in the Ozarks died at eighty-seven still known in the region as Colonel Crump.
His life tracked the arc of northwest Arkansas from the farm and the county seat through war, Reconstruction, the last years of the Indian Territory frontier, and into the early twentieth century.
