Entries - County: Crawford - Starting with R

Arkansas native Bass Reeves was one of the first Black lawmen west of the Mississippi River. As one of the most respected lawmen working in Indian Territory, he achieved legendary status for the number of criminals he captured. Bass Reeves was born enslaved in Crawford County in July 1838. His owners, the William S. Reeves family, moved to Grayson County, Texas, in 1846. During the Civil War, Bass became a fugitive slave and found refuge in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) amongst the Creek and Seminole Indians. Reeves is believed to have served with the irregular or regular Union Indians that fought in Indian Territory during the Civil War. After the Civil War, Reeves settled in Van Buren (Crawford County) with …

Willis Reeves was hanged on July 15, 1881, in Van Buren (Crawford County) in a botched but ultimately successful execution for the slaying of an African American youth the previous year. Willis Reeves, who a newspaper wrote was “chunky, muscular, dark-brown and had a malignant countenance,” became involved “in a dispute” with a Black youth named John Drake in Van Buren on June 6, 1880. Reeves ending up pulling a pistol and shooting Drake in the head, killing him. Though no accounts appear to chronicle Reeves’s trial for murder, he was found guilty and sentenced to hang on July 15, 1881. Reeves would later try to escape in hopes of being shot and said he “bet a thousand dollars he …

Robert Lee (Bob) Rogers served two years in the Arkansas General Assembly, eight years as a prosecuting attorney, and two years as Arkansas’s attorney general, initiating important antitrust suits against monopolistic corporations. He ran unsuccessfully for governor and then became one of the state’s outstanding criminal defense lawyers. He was also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the recently revived Ku Klux Klan. Bob Rogers was born on January 28, 1868, on a farm at West Point (White County), the oldest child of David E. Rogers and Maria Taylor Rogers. After his father died when he was about eleven, he dropped out of school to become the family’s principal breadwinner. He worked on nearby farms, and, after …

Rudy is a town in Crawford County, about five miles northwest of Van Buren (Crawford County). State Highways 282 and 348 both pass through the town. Both before and after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Osage hunted and fished in northwestern Arkansas, including the region where Rudy is now located. In 1817, the present location of Rudy was included in land ceded to the Cherokee, who moved into Arkansas Territory from eastern states. A treaty signed in 1828 moved the Cherokee farther west, opening the land for white settlement. The first white settlers in what would become Rudy were families with the last names of Green and Bell, arriving in 1830 and 1835, respectively. A school building built from logs …