Even in the morning hours of July 11, 1884 the weather in Fort Smith was trifling hot.
But the heat and the dusty, choked environment put off by the dirt roads in a bustling city on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma couldn't keep the rubberneckers away from yet another public execution at the gallows on the grounds of the Federal Courthouse for the Western District of Arkansas.
Executioner George Maledon, a tall and lanky presence at just about all of the 35 public hangings that had been conducted by the court to that point, was up and at work bright and early. There were ropes to be oiled, nooses to be coiled, and test to be made on the trapdoor that would plunge three men to their deaths simultaneously shortly after 1:00 p.m. that afternoon.
All three of The condemned prisoners were bad men. John Davis had killed a traveler in the Choctaw Nation in 1883. Thomas Thompson stabbed and beat James O'Halloran to death and threw the body in a well to try to escape discovery.
But the third man may have been the worst of the lot.
Jack Womankiller, a full-blooded Cherokee who jumped back and forth over the border of Arkansas and the Indian Territory committing a number of petty crimes, was sentenced to hang by Judge Isaac C. Parker for the shooting death of a settler stemming from the aftermath of a robbery by the drunken Womankiller.
Womankiller had been a pest to local law enforcement for a long time, committing numerous petty crimes on both sides of the border in the years leading up to his death sentence in Parker's court.
According to an article in the daily Arkansas Fazette from May 13, 1884 detailing the conviction of the 30-year-old Womankille, he and his victim were traveling companions and were last seen approximately three miles southeast of Maysville in Benton County.
While the unincorporated community of Maysville is mainly a bedroom community to surrounding larger cities now, in 1883 it was a hustling and bustling town that rivaled the size of Bentonville at the time.
Womankiller and his traveling companion, 73-year-old Nathaniel Wyatt, had been seen in Maysville in early May of 1883 and later that evening stopped at the home of a native American farming couple just inside the border.
Womankiller, who was drunk, asked the couple if they could provide him with dinner. His traveling companion rode on down the road as the couple served up a meal to a weary stranger, which was the custom at the time.
Wyatt and his wife had migrated to Arkansas from Ohio sometime shortly after 1870 and owned a small but prosperous farm on the edge of Benton county where they lived with their teenage children.
When the lady of the house asked Womankiller why the "white man" did not come in he replied that he had "told him to go on, but it made no difference" as he was going to kill him and they might look out for buzzards up there real soon.
When Womankiller left the house, riding in the same direction as Wyatt, the couple was alarmed enough that they reached out to a local constable to tell him what had been said at the dinner table. He rode down the trail a few miles, didn't see anything, and came on back to his home on the edge of the Maysville.
Four days later the body of Wyatt was located beside the road less than a half mile from where the Constable had ended his search. As predicted by Woman killer, buzzards circling clearing just beyond the tree line on the primitive r oad tipped off the presence of the body.
The wife of the victim identified the body from the vest he was weraing and the cane he was carrying when he had left the house earlier in the day. Womankiller had robbed his victim of about $200.
Notwithstanding his braggadocio statement to the woman who had fed him dinner the night of Wyatt's death, Womankiller also bragged of the deed among his tribal members.
Deputies for the Western District track down woman killer in Indian Territory and brought him back to stand trial in Fort smith on March 13 1883. They had found him in the location of Spavinaw Creek Road and Sellers Farm which is located right on the border between the two states.
He was convicted on mainly circumstantial evidence and from the testimony of the woman that had fed him and those he had callously informed of his misdeeds.
Sentenced to hang by the always stoic Parker, Womankiller eventually confessed to the crime. After spending nearly fifteen months in the basement jailhouse that earned the nickname Hell on the Border, he, Thompson and Davis were shackled and led to the gallows after their last meal.
The three men were to be hung simultaneously. Both the other condemned men made speeches in which they publicly confessed to their crime and asked the families of the victims and the Lord to forgive them.
When it came time to put the hood on Womankiller he was asked if he had any last words. He shook his head no defiantly, and Maledon slipped on the hood and tightened the noose on the rope around neck.
A sharp pull on the lever sent all three men on a drop of approximately feet. When the ropes reached their limits, Davis and Thompson suffered immediate broken necks and died within a few minutes. Womankiller maintained a heartbeat for just over 12 minutes before the attending physicians declared him dead as well.
The assembled crowd, who had been festive and partaking of the food and other items provided by vendors prior to the hanging quickly dispersed.
The execution had been the 11th of multiple convicted men under the auspices of Isaac C. Parker.
In April of the following year William Phillips was treated to a neck stretching, only the fourth time that a single man had died on Parker's gallows.
Womankillers body was claimed by relatives who apparently buried him in an unmarked grave near his home in Indian territory.
Nathaniel Wyatt was buried in the Rich Cemetery in the Benton County community of Cherokee City near where he lived.
