McClish Impson (Execution of)

On January 15, 1875, a Native American man named McClish Impson was executed at Fort Smith (Sebastian County). According to court records, Impson had murdered an unidentified man in Indian Country in 1873.

While Impson does not appear in public records, there is some information available about his history. Historian Jerry Akins reports that his mother died when he was an infant, and he was adopted by a Christian family and given a Christian name and education. When he was fourteen, his adoptive father died, and his biological father took him in. His father, part of a gang of horse thieves, introduced Impson “to his drinking, gambling, horse-stealing, murderous, vagabond way of life.” His father was killed around 1872. In February of the following year, Impson was riding with an unidentified white man near Boggy Bottom, the fertile farmland in the valley of the Clear Boggy and Muddy Boggy rivers in present-day Choctaw County, Oklahoma. He killed the man and then took his horse and around $20.

A grand jury met in May 1873 and indicted Impson. In June, the U.S. marshal was ordered to capture him and bring him in for trial at the November session of the U.S. District Court in Fort Smith. He was captured in late September, and his application to secure witnesses was granted in court in November 1873. His trial was held in November of the following year, and he was convicted on November 12, 1874. According to Akins, when asked the following day if he had anything to say, Impson demurred, saying he had “nothing further or other to say than he has heretofore said.” His execution date was set for January 15, 1875. According to court records, by early January, the government had recovered all costs related to the trial from Impson, in the amount of $963.40.

Impson apparently appealed. On January 3, 1875, the Daily Milwaukee News reported that U.S. Attorney General George Henry Williams had declined to recommend that the president commute Impson’s sentence. According to Akins, Impson confessed to his crime shortly before his execution, saying that “I have made my peace with God and look to him alone for mercy….My father, who is now dead, has brought me to the scaffold; it was through his teachings that I am now compelled to die. May God bless him and I humbly ask forgiveness of everyone in the world.” According to a newspaper report cited by Akins, on the day of the execution, “Impson ascended the [scaffold] steps without hesitation and ‘stood there with that cool, calm indifference to his fate, that none but a brave Indian could assume.” This reference to the stoic Native American is a common trope in newspapers of the time.

For additional information:
Akins, Jerry. “Hangin’ Times in Fort Smith.” Journal of the Fort Smith Historical Society 25 (September 2001): 7–15. Online at https://uafslibrary.com/fshsj/25-02_Complete_Issue.pdf (accessed April 16, 2024).

“A Red Man Who Must Swing.” Daily Milwaukee News, January 3, 1875, p. 1.

Nancy Snell Griffith
Davidson, North Carolina