Daniel Alexander Stanfield was a White/Caucasian male, age 72. On January 5, 1914, the longtime town marshal of St. Francis, a small community in Clay County, Arkansas, confronted danger as part of the routine burdens of his post. Born in Maury County, Tennessee, in January 1841, he had settled in St. Francis by the turn of the century and served as its marshal for years, a familiar figure whose headstone would later memorialize that he was “murdered while in discharge of his duty as an
officer.”
That winter day turned violent when a man identified in state historical notes as James Billips—sought in Oklahoma on burglary charges—shot Stanfield on the north side of town. Early press accounts echoed the detail that the killer was “a man from Oklahoma,” capturing in a few spare words both the swiftness and the shock of the attack. The strike cut down a marshal who, by some reckonings, was only days shy of his seventy-third birthday, though burial records and state heritage notes place him at seventy-two.
In the immediate aftermath, the assailant was taken into custody and faced the courts. Contemporary law-enforcement memorial records state that the prisoner who killed Marshal Stanfield was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, a sparse official summary that nonetheless fixes the outcome with certainty. The same memorial roll lists Stanfield’s end of watch as Monday, January 5, 1914, the sole line-of-duty death recorded for the St. Francis Marshal’s Office.
Over a century later, the contours of the story remain clear: a veteran local peace officer, doing the ordinary work of guarding a man under arrest, was felled by gunfire; the killer was arrested and imprisoned; and the town remembered its marshal as the first officer in Clay County to die in the line of duty. Stanfield lies in Hall Cemetery at Saint Francis, his grave and the brief notices that survive preserving a life of public service and the stark terms of its end.
