FORT SMITH, Ark. (AP) - The final resting place for scores of U.S. Marshal's should house The U.S. Marshal Service history museum, once housed in Laramie, Arkansas promoters are arguing.

The U.S. Marshal Service plans to form a committee to draw up standards for deciding what community will become the new home of an agency history museum, officials say.

Arkansas tourism promoters hope the exhibit can be brought to Fort Smith to form the core of a new U.S. Marshals Museum.

"It would be a natural extension of Fort Smith's frontier history, and it would bring another major attraction to draw out-of-town tourism dollars to the area," Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Claude Legris said.

Fort Smith is the final resting place for possibly more U.S. marshals and deputies than any other area, said Richard "Dick" O'Connell, Fort Smith-based U.S. marshal for the Western District of Arkansas.

There are at least 141 actual marshals and deputies buried in Fort Smith, O'Connell said.

According to a Web site devoted to the history of the Marshal Service, at one point in the late 1800s, U.S. District Judge Isaac C. Parker, who held court at Fort Smith, employed more than 200 deputy U.S. marshals.

Formerly housed in the Wyoming Territorial Park in Laramie, the museum collection has been closed and in storage since January 2003. The collection was formed to commemorate the service's bicentennial and spent 2.5 years as a traveling exhibit. It was put on exhibit in 13 cities, but when the bicentennial celebration ended in 1991, Laramie beat out other communities bidding to house it permanently.