Volume 22, Number 11 · June 26, 1975
In the Promised Land
By Gene Lyons
From the government's point of view the city of Fort Smith, Arkansas, may not prove to be so unpromising a location for the largest of the last four strategic hamlets as it may at first have seemed. The city, after all, began its brief and inglorious history as a staging area for US Cavalry search-and-destroy missions into the adjacent Indian Territories at just about the same time that the French were moving into Indochina in force. The closing of the frontier remains an unpleasant rumor. At Fort Smith one can easily buy an automatic pistol for the asking, but no legal drink stronger than wine. The downtown area, tucked into a narrow loop in the Arkansas River, has the raw seediness of a western rather than a southern town. Out past the new air-conditioned shopping mall east of town on the way to the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, the Missionary Baptist Church sits near a Hep-Ur-Sef gasoline station, salvation by faith and free enterprise juxtaposed in matching mobile homes.
Feature, 3489 words
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