until his death in office, on November 17, 1896. Parker arrived in Fort Smith on May 4, 1875, initially without his family. Parker's first session as the district judge was on May 10, 1875, with court prosecutor W. H. H. Clayton. Clayton served as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas for fourteen of Parker's twenty-one years on the court. Also on May 10, Parker commissioned Bass Reeves as a Deputy US Marshal. Reeves became one of the first African American lawmen west of the Mississippi River. In May 1875, Parker tried 18 men during his first session of court, all of whom were charged with murder; 15 were convicted in jury trials. Parker sentenced eight of them to a mandatory death penalty. He ordered six of the men to be executed at the same time on September 3, 1875. One of those sentenced to death was killed trying to escape. The governor commuted the sentence of another to life in prison due to his youth. In an interview with the St. Louis Republic on September 1, 1896, Parker said that he had no say in whether a convict was to be hanged due to compulsory death sentences, and that he favored "the abolition of capital punishment". Parker's court had final jurisdiction over federal crimes in the Indian Territory from 1875 until 1889, as there was no court available for appeals. The Five Civilized Tribes and other Native American tribes in the Indian Territory had jurisdiction over their own citizens through their tribal legal systems and governments. Federal law in Indian Territory applied to non-Indian United States citizens. According to Congress, the federal court for the Western District of Arkansas was to meet in four separate terms each year: in February, May, August, and November. The court had such a large caseload that the four terms ran together. Parker's court sat six days a week in order to ensure prosecuting as many cases as possible each term, and often up to ten hours each day. In 1883, Congress reduced the jurisdiction of the court, reassigning parts of the Indian Territory to federal courts in Texas and Kansas; however, the increasing number of European-American settlers moving into the Indian Territories still increased the court's workload. From May 1, 1889, Congress made changes to allow appeals of capital convictions to the United States Supreme Court. Forty-four cases in which