Federal Judge, Fort Smith, Arkansas

Background.

Isaac Parker was born in Belmont County, Ohio. After studying and teaching school, Parker was admitted to the bar in Ohio when he was twenty-one. He moved to Saint Joseph, Missouri, where he practiced law and worked for the Republican Party. In 1864 he was elected district attorney and served as a presidential elector for Abraham Lincoln. Four years later he was elected to a judgeship, and in 1870 to Congress. In 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant nominated Parker to be chief justice of the Utah Territory. After the Senate had confirmed Parker, though, Grant decided to send him instead to Fort Smith, where the federal circuit court for the Western District of Arkansas had jurisdiction over thirty counties in Arkansas and the entire Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma). Parker, at thirty-six, was the country's youngest federal judge.

The Indian Territory.

The Western...