"I have ever had the single aim of justice in view … ‘Do equal and exact justice,’ is my motto, and I have often said to the grand jury, ‘Permit no innocent man to be punished, but let no guilty man escape.’"
When the honorable Judge Isaac C. Parker was appointed to the bench for the Western District of Arkansas by President Ulysses s Grant, he inherited a near impossible situation from an administration that was strife with greed and corruption under former judge William Storey.
The mandate to Parker was to take control of the court and turn the lawless Indian Territory into a place that was safe to live for not only the native inhabitants but for the whites as well, who had moved in and bought land from the Choctaws and Cherokees, many of which sold off parcels of their entitlements.
Parker's court was an anomaly. While he sent many men to die on the
gallows, with the only reprieve being a commuted sentence from the President, he was also handcuffed by the laws of the land.
In an effort to clean up the wild Indian Territory, any man convicted of murder in Judge Parker's court was automatically sentenced to death by hanging on the gallows. If a trial was held and the jury brought in a conviction of murder, Parker had no choice but the sentence the offender to hang by his neck until he was dead.
By the time the first hanging day proclaimed by Parker came around in September , 1875, he had sentenced eight men to die and planned on sending all eight to the gallows on the same day.
All but two of those sentenced in that period would end up leaving this world at the end of a rope oiled and stretched by hangman George Maledon.
One of the condemned, a man by the name of Frank Butler attempted to escape while being transferred from the jail to the courtroom on June 14th 1875. Butler escaped from the guard and ran toward the stone wall surrounding the old fort but he was shot in the head and killed by several members of the jail staff as he ran for the wall.
The six men that fell through the trap door that day included:
James Moore- Moore, a resident of Johnson County, Missouri killed a posse member by the name of Spivey as marshals tried to arrest him for horse stealing.
Heck Campbell - Campbell was the lone black man sentenced to hang on the fateful day. Twenty-one years old and a native of the Choctaw Nation, Campbell was a partner of the aforementioned Butler and both men were convicted of killing Lawson Ross and his daughter in the Indian territory.
Sam W. Fooy -Fooy, 32 was convicted for the murder of J Emmet Neff, a school teacher whom he tracked from a boarding house in the Indian Territory and killed for the $200 he was carrying as payment for the school term he had just taught.
Jackson Whittington- Whittington murdered a 71-year-old man by the name of Turner, who he robbed and killed as the old man was tending cornfields at his Choctaw Nation home. Turner's son came up on the horrific scene where Whittington was carving up his father with a knife and gave chase for several miles, shooting at the killer the entire time. Weddington's downfall after escaping the wrath of the murdered man's son was bragging to others about the murder and, eventually, word got back to the US deputies.
Daniel Evans - Evans was a 21-year-old white man who killed a traveling companion named Seabolt and robbed him of all his money, possessions and his boots. Those boots proved to be a strong link in his chain of conviction. The murder victim, Watt Grayson, was murdered in Creek Nation near Eufaula. Evans, who finally confessed to the crime told deputies and court officials that a large amount of the money he stole was buried near a spring in Bosque County Texas. When arrested, Evans was still wearing the dead man's boots.
Smoker Mankiller - Mankiller was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian who was barely 20 years old. He killed a man named Short and was the only one of the condemned man who refused to entertain or speak to a preacher in his final days. Mankiller approached the entire execution process as a big joke and was defiant to the bitter end.
That brings us to the eighth person that was sentenced to die that day.
Oscar Snow was an 18-year-old "not fully grown" white man who was convicted of the murder of Henry Beauchamp near the Red River in the Choctaw country. According to contemporary newspaper reports at the time, women, instead of money, was incentive in the murder.
Snow, along with another young man by the name of Lewis, had become infatuated with Beauchamp's wife and one of her nieces who was living with he couple. The four entered into an agreement to kill Beauchamp and Lewis committed the foul deed by shooting Beauchamp while he worked in a field.
Lewis alluded officers and was never apprehended. Testimony showed that Lewis alone pulled the trigger that killed the victim. Despite the evidence that Snow was merely a co-conspirator caught up in his infatuation of a wanton woman, the jury returned a verdict guilty and by law Parker had no choice but to sentence him to hang.
Snow's mother, who attended the trial, spared no expense in trying to exonerate her son. She hired the best attorneys in the region, approached journalists to plead her son's side of the story, and was at the gate of the infamous "Hell on the Border" jail in the basement of the courthouse on a daily basis, imploring the jailers to have mercy on her offspring.
Her consistency and theatrics finally got her an audience with Parker. Finally, scant two weeks before the execution was to be held, the court received an order of commutation from the office of President U.S. Grant and modifying Young Snow's sentence to that of life imprisonment at hard labor at the Leavenworth prison camp.
Since relief from the gallows in Fort Smith was only available through presidential commutation, over the years a number of condemned men saw their lives spared due to the graciousness of the Oval Office. When you take time to make an in-depth dive into many of those, the sentences were overturned because of juror or prosecutorial error, new evidence, and other contributing factors.
Not so in the case with Oscar Snow.
Very deep in his prosecution jacket among papers and articles at the National Archives is a gracefully penned letter from Isaac Charles Parker to the federal sentencing commission in which he cited the youth and irresponsible nature of Snow, the recklessness of ironclad laws that required him to sentence more than 140 men to die and the unique circumstances surrounding the case.
In the end, it was the compelling words of Isaac c Parker that led to the life of young Oscar Snow being spared.
Records indicate that Snow served out the rest of his life in the Kansas prison. There is no record of his body ever being released to family members and it is presumed he was buried in a Potter's field upon his death on the prison grounds.
But the fact that he died so many miles and so many years removed from an auspicious hanging in Fort Smith, that drew over 5,000 curious on lookers on September 3, 1875, is a clear indication that "The Hanging Judge" was less callous and vindictive then he may have been remembered in history.
