Fort Smith is the third-largest city in Arkansas and the county seat of Sebastian County. The fort was founded by the US Army in 1817 and named for General Thomas Adams Smith, and the fort was abandoned in 1824 when the garrison moved 80 miles west to Fort Gibson in the Indian Territory. Fort Smith transformed into a civilian town, and the Army re-established a presence at Fort Smith to enforce the Indian Removal Act during the 1830s. Many displaced Indians settled at Fort Smith and Van Buren across the Arkansas River. During the American Civil War, the Confederate States Army occupied Fort Smith for a year, and Union troops recaptured the fort on 1 September 1863 and held it until the end of the war. In 1871, Federal troops abandoned the fort for the last time, but the city continued to thrive, and, during the Wild West era, the fort was known as the hometown of the "hanging judge" Isaac Charles Parker, who sentenced 160 people to death and hanged 79 of them at Fort Smith's gallows. In 1996, a tornado destroyed much of historic downtown Fort Smith. In 2020, Fort Smith had a population of 89,142 people, of whom 56.91% were white, 19.59% Hispanic (including 11.6% Mexican and 2.2% Salvadoran), 8.53% Black, 5.72% Asian (including 2.2% Vietnamese and 1.7% Laotian), 1.74% Native American, 7.43% mixed, and .07% Pacific Islander. In 2018, George McGill, a Democrat, became Fort Smith's first Black mayor.
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