Introduction On June 7, , I was born in St. Except for four years of college and four years in Boston immediately after college, I have always been here, born and raised. To understand how I feel about the city, you have to understand and feel the word "roots.
Nevertheless, it works. I feel my spirit is sunk into the earth of the Arkanas River valley. Whenever I've spent an extensive amount of time in another place, I start to feel disoriented, a little lost. On returning to western Arkansas from Boston in late , I stopped at Artist's Point in the Ozarks to look at the hills. Tears came to my eyes because I recognized I was home. I looked at the maternal curves of the hills and mountains and knew that the land had made me as much as my mother and father.
It shares status as the county seat of Sebastian County along with Greenwood. Sebastian County was created in by the Arkansas legislature, and Fort Smith was incorporated in Early in the history of Arkansas and the city, Fort Smith was an important point of contact to the American West. Those are the facts, and clearly, Fort Smith has some things going for it. But, it has some negatives, too. Fort Smith is family. Sometimes we have members of our families who are flawed and have problems, but that doesn't mean we stop loving them.
In fact, it often means we just love them more. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was more here for everybody? Absolutely, yes. The city is constantly and slowly in the process of becoming. It always will be. Will it become the city everyone wants?
No, never. When Spanish explorers tramped through the area looking for El Dorado, he didn't find it here. There is no city of gold. Settlement to Civil War No indigenous peoples appear to have had permanent settlements at the time of European contact in what became Fort Smith. However, very near to Fort Smith in present-day Oklahoma the Spiro Mounds still give evidence of earlier occupation by Native Americans. The site is acres in area, contains 12 mounds and evidence of a Native American culture that occupied the site from to In south Fort Smith, a platform mound commonly called the Cavanaugh Mound exists in isolation and may have provided a vantage point from which the Spiro Mounds could have been seen in an earlier century.
