Willis Beard (Execution of)

Willis Beard was hanged on May 29, 1857, at Van Buren (Crawford County) for killing a man in the Indian Territory.

Willis Beard was convicted in U.S. District Court in November 1856 for killing a man named John Kelley in the Cherokee Nation. While no details of the murder appear to exist, Van Buren’s Arkansas Intelligencer wrote that “his was a remarkable conviction, made entirely on circumstantial evidence. All pointing to him as the guilty person, to the exclusion of every other hypothesis.”

On a rainy Friday, May 29, 1857, Beard, who continued to protest his innocence, was placed in a wagon with his coffin and taken to the execution site, where a large crowd had gathered. The Intelligencer wrote that “his shroud upon him was not whiter than his face, and while the wagon moved slowly on toward the gallows, he tottered to and fro like a weak babe, scarcely able to hold up his head.”

A minister accompanied him and prayed with him on the scaffold before a marshal put a hood over his head and the noose around his neck. Then the condemned man “for a moment trembling,…stood on the brink of eternity” before “the scaffold fell from beneath his feet, and the soul of Willis Beard was launched into the presence of the living God—who hath given the commandment ‘thou shall not kill.’”

For additional information:
“Execution of Willis Beard.” Arkansas Intelligencer, June 5, 1857, p. 2.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System