Fort Smith Double Execution of December 20, 1878

An African American man and a Creek Indian were hanged at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on December 20, 1878, after being convicted of murder in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.

James Diggs, a Black cowboy, was working for J. C. Gould along with Hiram Mann of Michigan to bring a cow to Kansas. Gould was paid twenty-seven dollars for the animal, receiving five five-dollar bills and two one-dollar bills. On August 3, 1873, Diggs rode to a house and said that a pair of Texans had ridden up to the three as they slept in a cabin, killing Gould and Mann while Diggs fled into the woods.

A group followed Diggs to the cabin where “Gould and Mann lay weltering in their blood, the former dead, and the latter in the last agonies of death, as was supposed.” (Mann, however, survived the attack.) After finding no sign of the Texans’ tracks and examining the place where Diggs said he had hidden in the woods and finding it undisturbed, they searched him and found twenty-seven dollars hidden in the lining of his coat. He was taken to Coffeyville, Kansas, just north of the Indian Territory, and then to Fort Smith, where he was jailed, escaping briefly in March 1874. Diggs was freed in November 1874 after Kansas officials had sent no documents in the case to Arkansas prosecutors and he had been imprisoned for a year.

Diggs returned to the Indian Territory, but Mann, who had been badly injured in the 1873 axe attack, recovered, saying, “Well, Diggs liked to have got away with me” after he awakened from a coma. Diggs was arrested in the Osage Nation on June 24, 1878. At his trial, Diggs was shocked when Mann arrived to testify against him. He was convicted of Gould’s murder on November 8, 1878, and Judge Isaac Parker sentenced him to hang on December 20, 1878.

John Postoak, a Creek, was convicted on August 16, 1878, for killing a husband and wife near Eufala in the Indian Territory in 1877. He was also sentenced to hang on December 20, 1878.

At about 1:00 p.m. on December 20, the two men heard their death warrants read and were led to the scaffold, accompanied by their spiritual advisers, V. V. Harland of the Methodist Episcopal Church for Postoak and C. G. Smith of the Colored Baptist Church for Diggs. After religious services, Diggs “made a brief speech, warning everybody against whiskey and gambling, as being the vices which brought him to his doom. Post Oak [sic] made a ten minute prayer in the Creek language.”

After the trap door opened, “Diggs struggled violently, but died in seven minutes, while Postoak did not apparently move a muscle, but his pulse continued to beat ten minutes.” Executioner George Maledon later recalled that “I remember but one occasion where I failed to break their necks and that was in the case of a little negro named James Diggs, who turned his head just as I sprung the trap and displaced the rope. He died hard, strangling to death.”

For additional information:
Akins, Jerry. Hangin’ Times in Fort Smith: A History of Executions in Judge Parker’s Court. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2012.

“A Double Execution.” Arkansas Democrat, December 21, 1878, p. 1.

“A Double Execution.” St. Joseph [Missouri] Gazette, December 21, 1878, p. 1.

Riley, Michael Owen. “Capital Punishment in Oklahoma: 1835–1966.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2012. Online at https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/518/ (accessed March 19, 2026).

“Why Diggs Must Swing.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 10, 1878, p. 4.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas