Much of what my peers in later years knew of Judge Isaac Parker came not from personal contact nor the serious and studious biographer, but from the sensational columns of newspapers. Parker was himself a victim of federal government reaction to a siege of lawlessness in the Indian Territory, and of misunderstanding and apathy. He was overseer of a land mostly ignored by those with power to change it, except when the news of a multiple hanging burst upon the pages of the Eastern press. He was the boy crying wolf, and the wolf was always there! Yet nobody listened until the judge’s pronouncement of sentence on some violent felon, and then for only a moment of horror before all of it was pushed from the mind again. When he took the bench in Fort Smith, capital crimes and their punishment were proscribed by law, a fact seldom remarked upon in print or on the floors of Congress. In pronouncing death sentences, Parker often explained to the condemned that the letter of the law, which he was bound to observe, left him no alternative.
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