"Fort Smith" is synonymous with "The Hanging Judge" a number of men swung from various gallows in Fort Smith while Issac C. Parker was still a relatively new judge in the Twelfth Judicial District of Missouri.
Franklin Patterson was a Missouri native and discharged Union soldier who was hanged on May 5, 1865, in Fort Smith for the murder of a successful Crawford County citizen. Frank Marzall.
In 1865, Marzall was murdered by Patterson, who the Fort Smith New Era described as “about 34 years old, of profane and intemperate habits, living in the exulting ecstacies [sic] of passionate indulgences, rather than in the clearer, steadier lights of dispassionate reason.”
The 1860 federal census listed Frank Marzall as being forty-eight, and a native of Sweden who lived in Van Buren. A farmer, Marzall owned $600 in real estate and $2,630 in personal property. (Total worth of approximately $122,222.03 in 2024 dollars.)
Marzall is thought to have immigrated to Arkansqs from Michigan after having arrived in America from Sweden on a fishing vessel at the age of 18. "Marzall" is popularly thought to have been Americanized to "Marshall" for most of the immigrants who came to America before 1840.
"Marzall" is such an uncommon last name in the United States that among the 238 million memorials listed on "Find a Grave: in the world only two have that unique spelling.
Marzall, who was listed as having lived in "Upper Township" in Crawford County apparently owned a pair of mules that Patterson wanted, so Patterson said that he was seizing them for the Federal base, which was located at Van Buren at the time. This was a common tactic used by rogue highwaymen at the time to steal livestock from unsuspecting farmers.
Marzall did not believe Patterson had the authority to make such a seizure and decided to accompany him to Van Buren to check on his claim. After riding several miles, Patterson shot and fatally wounded Marzall after he refused to return to his home.
The newspaper said Patterson was a Fayette County, Missouri, native who had been discharged from the First Missouri Cavalry Regiment. Patterson does not appear on any muster rolls for the regiment, and he is thought to have been one of many of the pro-Union bushwhackers who populated western and northwest Arkansas at the time.
Patterson gave a number of conflicting statements about the killing, sometimes admitting and sometimes denying the crime. He finally told the Fort Smith base chaplain that “if he had shot down Marzoll [sic], he had lost all remembrance of the act, and that he was so drunk on that day he did not know what he was doing.”
At the chaplain’s behest, Patterson agreed “to say…publicly, on the fatal platform, that the unhappy fate of the prisoner should be regarded…as a solemn warning against the intemperate use of liquor.”
The condemned man instead implied that the whiskey he had consumed was drugged and its supplier was to blame for Marzall’s death.
According to the Fort Smith New Era at 9:30 a.m. on May 5, 1865, the trap door of the gallows opened, “and the murderer dangled in the death-struggles amid the green earth beneath and the bright skies above, furnishing to the numerous throng of spectators an impression and awful rendering of the Scripture passage: ‘The way of the transgressor is hard.’
The location of the gravesites for both Patterson and Marzall have been lost to history.
