Fort Smith Triple Execution of June 29, 1883

Two Black men and a Native American man (Creek or Seminole) were hanged at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on June 29, 1883, after being convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas of murders committed in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).

Born enslaved in Georgia, William H. Finch was serving as a tailor for the Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment at Fort Sill in the Indian Territory when he deserted in July 1882 after being called before the post’s commanding officer, whom he considered tyrannical. He fled to Texas on a stolen horse, where he was arrested. Sergeant Bushy Johnson and Privates Washington M. Grimky and Jerry McCarty, also serving in the all-Black Twenty-fourth Infantry, were sent to escort him back to Fort Sill. About twenty miles from the post, they stopped to eat, after which Johnson and Grimky fell asleep. Finch feigned sleep and then grabbed guns and shot the two men, which McCarty, who had gone to fetch water, witnessed. Finch fled, and McCarty found Grimky dead and Johnson mortally wounded.

Finch was again arrested in Texas and returned to Fort Smith. Described as “a spare-built, intelligent-looking mulatto about 5 feet 7 inches in height, 28 years old, tolerably well educated, and no doubt very shrewd,” he was tried in Judge Isaac Parker’s court and convicted on February 23, 1883. The Arkansas Gazette reported that “before sentence was pronounced he delivered a carefully prepared speech of about thirty minutes in length, protesting his innocence. His language was excellent throughout, and some portions beautiful.”

Martin Joseph (sometimes known as “Bully” Johnson), described as “a compact and well-built negro, about 6 feet high and 25 years old,” was part of a gang of horse thieves that included Henry Loftis, another Black man, and Bud Stephens, a white man. The three, along with Stephens’s teenaged wife, went into the Arbuckle Mountains to prepare a corral to hold the horses they planned to steal. Loftis shot Stephens in the head, and Joseph went to the wife, telling her that her husband was injured and calling for her. When they reached a cave, “placing a revolver at her head these fiends ravished her repeatedly and…murdered her in cold blood, by sending a bullet through her brain.” They threw her body into a deep part of the cave.

Joseph later got drunk and told Loftis’s brother William about the killings. The story spread, and after Joseph shot Henry Loftis to death in an argument over a saddle, lawmen decided to investigate the rumored murders. When the posse found the cave, a young man named John Spence volunteered to be lowered into it to look for Mrs. Stephens’s body. He found her skeleton covered by rattlesnakes and, arming himself with a pistol, “commenced war upon the snakes,” an incident believed to have inspired a scene in Charles Portis’s novel True Grit.

The bones of the unfortunate couple were gathered and shown to Joseph at his April 1883 trial in Fort Smith. The trial before a jury of seven Black and five white men lasted five days, and the jurors deliberated only about thirty minutes before returning a guilty verdict. Finch, Joseph and Tee-o-lit-es, a Native American man who had been convicted of murdering a man, were sentenced on May 5, 1883, to hang on June 29, 1883.

The three men climbed the steps to the gallows at 11:27 a.m. on June 29, where a preacher read Psalm 90 and then led a singing of “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” during which “the voice of Finch rang high above the rest, as he sat back with clasped hands and upraised eyes, while Joseph…joined in with occasional deep howls, rolling his eyes around.”

After another prayer, Finch made an eloquent speech during which he admitted shooting the two soldiers. Tee-o-lit-es was too ill to make a statement, and Joseph “had nothing to say.” Black caps were placed over the doomed men’s faces, ropes were tightened around their necks, and at 11:48 a.m. “the drop fell, giving them a clear fall of eight feet. The Indian never moved, and his neck looked as if pulled nearly in two, but both Finch and Joseph died hard, their chests heaving and their legs drawing up spasmodically.” All were declared dead within nine minutes.

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.

“Human Fiends.” Arkansas Gazette, June 30, 1883, pp. 1, 5.

Riley, Michael Owen. “Capital Punishment in Oklahoma: 1835–1966.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2012. Online at https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/518/ (accessed December 22, 2025).

“Three Murderers Sentenced.” Arkansas Gazette, May 6, 1883, p. 1.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas