Opportunities are dwindling to catch a one-act play about a mostly forgotten story of corruption and real estate from Fort Smith's 19th century. The play, "The Western District," is based on events surrounding the relocation of the Western District Court of Arkansas from Van Buren to Fort Smith in May 1871, and what happened thereafter. There are performances Friday and Saturday at the Fort Smith Museum of History, then July 16 at The Vault, 1905 Sports Grill in Fort Smith, and July 19 at the 1886 Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, and then a final performance July 25 at the Brews on the Border Beer Festival. Those buying VIP tickets to that festival will be able to see the play. The play is written and produced by Brandon Chase Goldsmith. He says his script has its origins in official U.S. government documents.
Goldsmith: So in 1871, the federal courts moved from Van Buren to Fort Smith, and they put it in the Hole in the Wall Saloon, which was a bar. I found this out because that's where 21 West End is today. My friend was the general manager, and he wanted me to help his white staff out. And I said, do you have a store? And he pointed to the Hole in the Wall Saloon in the atrium, had a little thing in there. So I started looking that up and found out it really existed. And then I found all these 500 pages of congressional investigation when the court was first there. When the federal court first moved to Fort Smith, in 14 months and 20 days, it becomes the most corrupt courthouse in the entire United States. And that's actually what ends up bringing Judge Parker to Fort Smith, not what everyone else believes, which was for him to calm Indian territory. It was basically the judge, the marshal, the deputies were all involved in the scam. So I took all that and turned it into a show and a book, and all the things.
Kellams: All right, let's not give anything too much away. But give me an example of this corruption that was going on. Is there one sort of thing that signifies it?
Goldsmith: Well, so there's three major scams that they were doing. The first major scam that they were doing is they called it working up business. So if a marshal saw someone doing something in Indian territory, they could arrest them, bring them back to Fort Smith, and they would backdate the warrant, which is completely unconstitutional. The commissioner at the time, who was backdating the warrants, was also the mayor of Fort Smith at the time. So that's the first scam.
The second one was they had two sets of books, one of real deputies, one of fake deputies, and they would tell a marshal, can you get this person on your own? If you could, what they would do is when you came back, you would write up two sets of fake posse members, and the deputy would get to keep one. And then they called it walking up to the office, and they would give the money to the office. So the deputy got one fake posse member and the other one got... But they ran the books so tight of the fake ones, they made sure that they didn't overlap so they could never get caught. That's why they weren't able to get caught, because they were so good at keeping the fake deputies going.
And then the third and final one is if you're running any kind of big scam in a city, you need to have the business owners on your side. So what they would do is they would go to the businesses that they liked, and they would deputize the business owners and turn them into "returning marshals," which I talked to the Marshals Museum, and that is not a real position. And the way that it works is if a deputy goes into Indian territory, it doesn't matter if they bring back one prisoner or three prisoners, they get the same per diem, mileage and all that. So what they would do is if they had more than one prisoner, they would take the other one to the returning marshal. They would take it into the court and get paid $300 to $500 for doing nothing. And that's basically how they bribed the business owners.
Kellams: This was lucrative.
Goldsmith: Oh yeah. The original investigation found $420,000, or around $11 million in today's money, that they did. But then a further investigation found that they ended up, in all these schemes, doing $750,000, around $20 million in today's money, that they end up scamming the system. So they send Secret Service agents. What I did with this play is I made the Secret Service agent who uncovers the whole thing come in undercover as a book canvasser. This is all documented in the congressional investigation. He comes in and starts flipping the deputies because he has all the fake names that they've been using, and he ends up turning this one main deputy, called Deputy Shoemaker, who's in the play. And they end up taking him up to Washington to testify. But he uncovers all the different schemes that they're doing, because one of the major ones is there was another Secret Service agent who came in before him, and they scammed him.
Basically, they sent him to all the people who were involved in the scam, and they sent all the deputies into Indian territory, so he couldn't investigate any of them. So he takes it to the attorney general in Van Buren. And what he doesn't know is the attorney general and the judge are involved in a bribery scheme together where they're selling "no process," how a judge can go and reduce your charges or wipe them out. A judge has that ability. If you had enough money, they're making them go away. How they found this out is liquor was illegal in Indian territory. This guy named Mash had a liquor store. He comes in and says, let's make a deal. And they found the IOUs to Judge Story for $2,500, and he made one to Huckleberry, the attorney general, for $500. All they had to do was burn them, and nothing's in the cloud back then, so I think they kept them as trophies. The Secret Service ends up finding those receipts for the bribes, and that's how Judge Story got caught in his bribery scheme. And they keep unraveling all these different things, because they're in charge of the court and they're investigating themselves. They have one of their people, they make him the foreman of the grand jury. They send all the deputies to him. He tells them the questions they're going to ask. The court clerk gives them all the answers to their questions. And somehow they got past a grand jury.
Kellams: I mean, this is brazen.
Goldsmith: Oh yeah. And that's the thing. And then there's one newspaper in town that actually covers their corruption. It's the Arkansas Patriot. And I have that as a main character. There's a lady, amazing character, she actually comes from New York. She is a romance writer for a New York weekly, Harper's, back in the day. Poor lady is dragged from New York to Fort Smith. Her husband, who is a general, gets her a newspaper, and she continues to write her romances on the front page of every paper so that people have to buy the paper every week to finish the story. Well, her paper is the only one that reports on the corruption. They actually have a headline saying "whitewashing satisfaction guaranteed, if you can only manipulate a grand jury." So I have her journey in the play of going from a novelist and romance writer to a reporter, taking real people and the real circumstances and then kind of wrapping them around and creating a fun play out of it.
Kellams: So this is a one act, and it must be mobile, because you've had it performed at all these places. It's going to be at the Fort Smith Museum of History. It's going to be at the Crescent Hotel. You can move this play pretty easily, it sounds like.
Goldsmith: Oh yeah. When I had it first created in 2018, I needed it to fit in the back of a pickup. My entire set fits in the back of a pickup truck. And we've gone to, oh my goodness, probably 12 locations on this run of the show. We've been running the play since April. We have done the show in restaurants. We have our own beer that goes along with the play. Back in the day, I found a beer, and Family Brewing made a Western District 1872 beer. So we went there and had the beer release party and did the play at the brewery, which was fun. And I've done it in bars, I've done it at Miss Laura's, and now we're doing the history museum. We've done the Marshals Museum. We do have another show coming up on the 16th at The Vault in Van Buren. It's kind of interesting, having done, I don't know of anyone who's done a show this long of a run in Fort Smith or the River Valley, a four month run. It's kind of sad, we're down to our last five shows.
Kellams: What I don't know about 19th century justice and legal proceedings could fit into Razorback Stadium. But is it not a red flag that they moved the courthouse to a saloon?
Goldsmith: Well, you know, it was kind of the nice thing about being in Fort Smith back in that time. No one in Washington cared what was going on here. So they could basically write blank checks and get away with it. It's blatant corruption. And a lot of people who see the play kind of comment and say, wow, things haven't changed.
Kellams: Are you working on a new play now?
Goldsmith: So what I'm doing is, while I was writing the play in Eureka at the Writers' Colony, I started realizing that all my main characters' names were all over the town. So I started researching that, and what I found out is the two main guys, you have Logan Roots, who's the marshal, and you have his deputy, Richard Kerens. They have to leave Fort Smith. Roots goes to Little Rock. Kerens goes to St. Louis. In February of '83, Roots starts the Eureka Improvement Company in Little Rock. In March of '83, Kerens starts the Eureka Railway Company. And if you look at each person's company, all the people who did the scams in Fort Smith are either... So here, I'm the president, you're my treasurer. Here, I'll be the president, you can be my secretary. Everyone is in each other's businesses. So basically the creation of Eureka Springs was a money laundering operation. And they end up creating the Crescent Hotel. And once you look deeper into it, Logan Roots' brother's company happens to get hired to build the railway, and then they buy his brother's company to build the Crescent Hotel. So it's just them recycling their money to each other.
Kellams: Money laundering.
Goldsmith: Yeah, basically.
Kellams: And so you're working on that now?
Goldsmith: Yeah, so part two of the play is now them taking the money that they stole from Fort Smith in order to create Eureka. It was kind of fun, I was there on May 20 writing the show, and it was the 140th anniversary of the opening of the Crescent. And I'm sitting there writing about them starting the Crescent during that same time. So it was fun, and it actually helped me find a really good plot point in the next play, because John Carroll, who was the mayor at the time, trying to turn Eureka into a town, was fighting, there was this big battle. So here's the thing, all the bad people end up making out somehow in all this, and everyone gets paid off, somehow everyone gets some money. So in the new play, I was like, how does John Carroll get paid off in all this? And it creates a really good kind of circular thing, because you like those circular closures in stories. So John Carroll, the day after the Crescent opens, that's the day he becomes the marshal for the Western District of Arkansas. So he ends up getting Logan Roots' position. We start in the bar with Logan, and right now the second play is ending with John Carroll taking that same position.
Kellams: Brandon, don't tell me that this is an example of crime does pay.
Goldsmith: I can't say that it's not, because they take everything to a grand jury, the grand jury says, sorry, statute of limitations, and that's why they get to keep all the funds.
Kellams: Before I let you go, I know that you're already working on the next edition of the Fort Smith International Film Festival that you founded and direct. How's that going?
Goldsmith: Well, we are in the movie watching phase of it. I guess I'll let you know now, we are moving the film festival to Nov. 5-7. We'll be making some big announcements about that in the next few weeks. We've got some really exciting stuff along with this new move. But yeah, we're currently, I've watched about 270 of the 550 films that have been submitted. So that's my, when people ask me what are you doing, I'm binge watching independent films, which is the dream.
Kellams: Brandon, congratulations on the play. Can't wait to see the next one. Can't wait to hear more about the November surroundings of the festival. Thanks for your time.
Goldsmith: No, it's always great to hang out with you and talk with you. I'll see you around.
Brandon Chase Goldsmith is the writer and producer of the one-act historical play "The Western District." There are performances Friday and Saturday at the Fort Smith Museum of History, then July 16 at The Vault, 1905 Sports Grill in Fort Smith. July 19, a road performance at the 1886 Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, and then as part of Brews on the Border Beer Fest, July 25. VIP tickets to that festival have a chance to see the play. Many more details can be found by searching "The Western District" on Facebook.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
