Hang 'Em High and the Hanging Judge: How a Book and a Film Rewrote Fort Smith

In Hang 'Em High, the judge nods to the hangman to begin. The real Judge Isaac C. Parker of the federal court at Fort Smith never attended a single execution during his tenure. The film's picture of him — and much of the popular image of "frontier justice" at Fort Smith — traces back to one sensational book.

The book

Homer Croy's He Hanged Them High: An Authentic Account of the Fanatical Judge Who Hanged Eighty-Eight Men, published by Little, Brown in 1952, was the first and most significant popular account of the Fort Smith court. Croy, a Missouri newspaperman and prolific writer on western subjects, was known among other writers for embellishing. Earlier twentieth-century writers had kept Judge Parker separate from the executions; Croy wove them together, casting Parker as a man driven by fanatical religious belief and obsessed with punishing the wicked. He admitted there was no way to establish that eighty-eight men were hanged, and used the number anyway. A condensed version ran in True magazine in April 1952, illustrated with an angry judge watching six nooses and a crowd from his window.

Croy's Parker became the embodiment of frontier justice as myth has it: simple, moral, necessary, swift, public and rugged. Yet the book, sensational and inaccurate as it was, drew national attention to the court's history and helped spark the community movement to restore Fort Smith's courtroom and gallows.

The film

Clint Eastwood had starred in television's Rawhide in the late 1950s and 1960s, then in Sergio Leone's Italian westerns — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Hang 'Em High, directed by Ted Post, who had worked with him on Rawhide, was his return to Hollywood and a breakthrough; a few years later came Dirty Harry. Eastwood was drawn to its subject, the pros and cons of capital punishment.

The film never credits Croy, but the debt is plain: the title, phrases like "tumbleweed wagon," the characterization of the judge — and scenes almost identical to the True magazine illustration.

Fact and fiction

The film came out when Hollywood was pushing the accepted limits of screen violence — the era of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch — and even its trailer featured a cartoon man hanging from a noose. With its vivid imagery and its constant use of the noose, Hang 'Em High remains the most influential of the films based on the Fort Smith story.

Questions to watch with

How does the film stereotype frontier justice? What does it say about capital punishment? Is Judge Fenton a sympathetic, fair character? How does the opening lynching of Jed Cooper contrast with the legal executions later? And how does its violence compare with movies today?

Sources

Based on "Fort Smith Goes to the Movies: Hang 'Em High (Site Bulletin)" from the National Park Service (Fort Smith National Historic Site), a work of the United States government in the public domain.