John Dowdy (Execution of)

John Dowdy was hanged at Camden (Ouachita County) on April 25, 1847, for murdering a Choctaw man (name unknown) in the first legal execution in Ouachita County.

On January 31, 1847, an apparently drunk Choctaw man got into an argument “about a dog” with another man, who knocked him down. Dowdy rushed at the Choctaw man, with whom he “had not exchanged a word,” and stabbed him under the left arm with a clasp knife, “causing almost instant death.”

Lawmen arrested Dowdy, who was brought before a justice of the peace and “committed to jail to await his trial before the Circuit Court.” While no accounts of the trial appear to survive, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang. According to the Arkansas Intelligencer, that sentence was carried out at Camden on April 25, 1847. Gallows were erected “in the hollow back of Oakland Cemetery.”

While a 1946 article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly says a man named Cowen was the next person to be legally executed in Camden “for killing another white man in a house near where the Rock Island depot stands,” the next documented hanging was that of Luke Tatum for murder in 1893.

For additional information:
Arkansas Intelligencer, June 12, 1847, p. 2, col. 1.

Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas, Vol. II. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1890.

“Murder.” [New Orleans, Louisiana] Times-Picayune, February 21, 1847, p. 2.

“Murder.” Washington Telegraph, February 10, 1847, p. 3.

Nunn, J. B. “Early Days of Camden.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 5 (Winter 1946): 330–340.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System