Fort Smith Triple Hanging of 1896

A Cherokee man and two brothers were hanged at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on April 30, 1896, for separate murders.

In August 1894, a merchant named Mike P. Cushing hired twenty-year-old Jack Chewie to help him peddle his wares in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Chewie apparently enlisted Webber Isaacs, a twenty-three-year-old Cherokee man, to assist him in robbing Cushing. The two shot and killed the peddler (Isaacs claimed that Chewie fired the fatal round), as well as his horse, and then dragged the man’s corpse away from the road, soaked it with coal oil, and set it afire.

According to the Arkansas Gazette, Cushing’s remains were found on September 4, 1894, and Chewie and Isaacs were suspects. The latter told at least two people about the crime and offered them money to remain silent. Chewie fled, but Isaacs was arrested and tried in Judge Isaac Parker’s United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas and convicted in February 1895 after the jury deliberated for about twenty minutes.

Parker set June 25, 1895, as the execution date for Isaacs and for Crawford Goldsby (a.k.a. Cherokee Bill), who was convicted in a separate case, but both executions were delayed while their appeals were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Isaacs’s conviction was affirmed on November 12, 1895.

In another case, George and John Pierce left Texas County, Missouri, in the company of William Vandevere in the fall of 1994. A farmer saw the Pierces driving a wagon with Vandevere, who was riding a gray horse, on January 14, 1895, in the Indian Territory. He heard a gunshot, and a short while later the Pierces returned to the farm, with one on the wagon and the other on a horse. The farmer got a neighbor, and they found Vandevere’s body below a creek bank, his head wrapped in a blanket with signs that he had been shot and struck with a hammer.

A posse followed the wagon tracks to Tahlequah in the Cherokee Nation and arrested the Pierces within a week of the murder. They arrived in Fort Smith in the last week of January and were tried on March 1, 1895. Both were convicted of murder and on June 5, 1895, Parker sentenced them to hang on August 1, 1895.

They remained jailed in Fort Smith, and George Pierce caused frequent trouble, often in concert with Goldsby. A newspaper noted that Pierce gained a reputation as “one of the most desperate and troublesome men in the jail, and is kept in irons locked in a cell.” The Pierces appealed their convictions to the point of seeking clemency from President Grover Cleveland, who declined to intervene.

Parker set April 30, 1896, for Isaacs and the two Pierce brothers to hang. (Isaacs’s accomplice, Jack Chewie, was killed in a gunfight with a posse on April 4, 1896.) All three were baptized into the Catholic Church on April 28, 1896, and a priest stayed with them as their spiritual advisor.

A small crowd gathered around the scaffold on April 30. The brothers left the jail at 1:30 p.m. and met their sister at the door, who was accompanied by John Pierce’s four-year-old son. “The condemned man picked up the little fellow and kissed him tenderly, the tears streaming from his eyes,” a newspaper reported.

The doomed men knelt on the scaffold with the priest and prayed, “Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me and forgive me my sins.” The trap door was opened at 2:04 p.m., and George Pierce died instantly, his neck broken, while “his brother and Isaacs strangled to death.” The Pierces’ sister brought their bodies to Mountain Grove, Missouri, for burial. Isaacs was buried in Fort Smith’s Oak Cemetery.

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.

“Brothers Sentenced to Hang.” Arkansas Gazette, June 6, 1895, p. 6.

“Convicted of Murder.” Arkansas Gazette, February 12, 1895, p. 6.

“Five Sentenced to Death,” Arkansas Kicker, March 14, 1896, p. 2.

“Five Will Hang.” Arkansas Gazette, March 5, 1896, p. 2.

“Jack Chewie Killed.” Mountain Echo, April 10, 1896, p. 4.

“Judge Parker Sustained.” Arkansas Gazette, November 14, 1895, p. 1.

“Must Forfeit Their Lives.” Forrest City Times, April 24, 1896, p. 5.

“Three Men Hung.” Arkansas Gazette, April 30, 1896, p. 14.

“Triple Hanging.” Arkansas Gazette, April 17, 1895, p. 2.

“Webber Isaacs.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/109027653/webber-isaacs (accessed November 21, 2025).

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas